The Malice Box Read online

  ‘When exactly have you been observing me?’

  ‘Robert, my spies are everywhere. Since I imagined we all had an interest in your making a favourable impression on young Kat, I thought we could shut you up tonight, thus obliging you to practise silent flirting and charm her off her feet without speaking – which you certainly seem to have done.’

  Katherine slipped her arm through Robert’s and faced Adam. ‘It also allowed me, Mr Hale-Devereaux, to think for a while that it was you under that costume, not Robert.’

  Adam beamed at them. ‘Good night, dear friends.’

  Katherine didn’t move. ‘How much did you have to pay to get that black horse to stand there up at Wandlebury fort? Was there supposed to be a knight too?’

  ‘Ah, now that’s one of the evening’s surprises. You see, I didn’t pay anyone to do anything. I’ve no idea whatsoever what that horse was doing there.’

  New York, August 26, 2004

  The Watchman blinked several times and opened his eyes wide, sitting perfectly still as he reaccustomed himself to his surroundings. He had been in a deep state of meditation. Now, as he returned to the quotidian world, he found that his worries were slightly eased. He was even a little excited. The game was on. Help had been enlisted. The risks were immense, and there were things he could not see. But the first steps in the battle had been taken.

  His eyes rested on the corkboard by his desk, where the photographs of two men and a woman were pinned amid scribbled notes, geometric diagrams and postcards showing landmarks of New York.

  Three remarkable talents, chained together by fate, linked through the years in an unending dance…

  There would be trials. It was the only way. Trials, deception and pain.

  The clock was ticking. One week, at most.

  He could feel the intensity of Adam Hale’s mighty will. He was fighting.

  The Watchman closed his eyes, directing his attention inward. He prayed.

  First would come the Trial by Earth. It might end right there. There was no option but to take the risk.

  Then Water, Fire, Air. Four trials, four days, four caches. Four keys to the Device. Four chances for Robert to die. Four deaths he must face.

  Then the mystery would deepen.

  Passing the four trials – if he did – would give him mastery of the four basic elements. Combining them in balance would create a fifth, a gateway, invisible in itself, even more rarefied than air. Ether, or quintessence. And if he could survive opening the gateway, he would be led to two more, both invisible unless he learned how to see. The sixth was Mind, orlight. The seventh was Spirit, or love, which imbued and cradled all the rest. It was the Path. It was the only way. And he would help where he could, but primarily he would watch. For he was their Watchman.

  He closed his eyes again and deepened his prayer.

  The Watchman had mentored many men and women, and he knew there were as many variations to the Path as there were individuals.

  Three days earlier, as Adam prepared to make his visit to the Iwnw, the Watchman had met him in Central Park, at the octagonal brick Chess and Checkers House, and discussed the events they knew were now coming. They had sat at one of the outdoor chess tables, shifting pieces around as they conferred. And then the Watchman had sent Adam away, and, sitting alone, he had mapped out the trials of Robert Reckliss.

  It would be a race against time: bringing Robert along the Path fast enoughto keep pace with Adam’s decline, without destroying him by going too fast. The Watchman would need to balance Adam’s will to resist against the capacity of Robert to evolve. One falling, one rising.

  Robert would have to endure the Path of Seth. There was no other option. He would have to be torn apart and built up again, in seven days, no more. Adam would not be able to last any longer than that against the Brotherhood. Even the Watchman had not undergone such a path. He would not have been able to survive it.

  The trials would have to be multidimensional, involving place, pattern, action and experience in a carefully woven whole. In taking each one, Robert would have to be brought to know, and tap into, specific physical and psychic energies, one after another, each building on the previous one.

  The trials would also have to be mapped to the impending detonation of the Ma’rifat’ – Robert would have to recover the keys and neutralize the grid they were arranged on, as he progressed along the Path.

  The Watchman held the grid in his mind’s eye. It was a known shape to him, a particular key used to harness the energies of the physical and spiritual worlds. The maker of the Ma’rifat’, working with the same forces, had chosen it to amplify the power of his Device, linking two focal points in downtown and uptown Manhattan. Robert would trace it on the city as he advanced through the trials.

  Robert would have to be carefully drawn in. He had been raised to be more than sceptical, to be actively hostile to the tenets of the Path. So the Watchman had framed it initially as one of Adam’s games, to put him on familiar terrain. The Watchman had told Adam to send the major key, the core, to Robert before going to see the Brotherhood of Iwnw. He needed to rid himself of it anyway. That had allowed Katherine to help shape his initial experience.

  The Path of Sethwas named after an ancient Egyptian myth, in which Osiris, a benevolent and civilizing king, was murdered by his brother, Seth. Seth dismembered his victim and dispersed his body parts far and wide. Osiris’s wife, Isis, who was also his sister, reassembled his remains and conceived a child by him, whom she hid among the marshes until he came of age. Then the child, Horus, attacked Seth to avenge his father. In an epic battle, each wounded the other, but neither was able to prevail. Eventually a tribunal of gods ruled against Seth, who was cast into the darkness as the evil god of the desert, chaos and storms.

  The myth itself, like similar ones in cultures around the world, partly reflected the millennial battles between the initiates of the Watchman’s Path and the Brotherhood of Iwnw. In China the Watchman’s predecessors were known as Fan Kuang Tzu, or the Sons of Reflected Light. In ancient Mexico they were the followers of the civilizing priest Quetzalcóatl, the Bird-Serpent, and the Iwnw were echoed in his enemy Tezcatlipoca, or Smoking Mirror.

  Each stage had a dilemma, and this one’s was simple: kill or be killed. The Path of Sethwould begin with death.

  They would have to expose Robert first to the most powerful, rawest, least organized energies latent within him: those to do with tribal responses, fighting and killing, survival and territory. These were the earth powers.

  To pass the trial, he would have to immerse himself in actions and experiences surrounding death, access those survival energies within himself and find a way to escape their shadow side.

  Some aspiring walkers of the Path never got beyond this stage, and their lives came to consist purely of fighting. For such people, unable to free themselves from the shadow of survival energies, life became simply a brutal struggle for dominion.

  Robert would face attack from the Iwnw. He would have to fight for his life, with a real risk that he might lose. And he would have to see into the heart of these energies, see what lay at the heart of hatred, of contempt, and acquire their strength while seeing beyond their shadow.

  He would recover a key, which would have a circular form.

  The Watchman prayed for him.

  Cambridge, March 1981

  At the door to her room, Katherine looked up at Robert and sighed. ‘Will you come in?’

  ‘God, yes.’

  The first kiss was electricity and blood, wine and cigarettes. She made small vulnerable sounds, trembled, grabbed him hard. Banging into furniture and grappling with buttons, they cut a trail of destruction to the bed.

  She pulled up her black witch’s dress. Then they were face to face and joined, and she was whispering and babbling sounds he didn’t recognize, and their breathing was scented honey and deep violet-orange, and sex consumed them.

  He dozed on her bed for a while, still semi-clothed. Whe
n he awoke, she was freshly showered, moving about her sitting room in a man’s dressing gown. She came to the bed and stood over him. He untied her dressing gown and started to kiss her body. She pulled back, smiling.

  ‘Time to do some writing,’ she said. ‘A little magic, a little writing, a little more sex. Yes? Help me?’

  Following her instructions, he moved a table to the middle of the sitting room and arranged chairs so they could sit on eachside of it.

  ‘A few candles, perhaps?’ She lit them and placed them around the room.

  He watched her, fascinated. ‘You like your atmosphere. Very conducive. Are you really a witch?’

  ‘Adam thinks so.’

  ‘He’s very attracted to you.’

  ‘Yes, he is. But he wants the play even more than he wants me. Which is why we don’t sleep together. Just bottle it up. Still, I have my little tricks. Witchy tricks.’

  ‘Do they involve surrogates? Such as myself?’

  ‘You’re not a surrogate. You’re Robert Reckliss.’

  ‘Why does he think you’re a witch, as opposed to just finding you bewitching?’

  ‘Ever heard of magick? With a k? Sex magick?’

  ‘Makes me think of Tommy Cooper.’

  Down on the floor by her desk, her kettle came to the boil and clicked off.

  ‘Mm… not really. It’s a taboo. I love taboos. They’re so sexy.’

  ‘So what is it?’

  ‘It’s not real. I just play with it. It’s just a way of releasing the unconscious. But the unconscious is very powerful. Far more than we realize.’

  ‘You mean chants and incantations and things like that?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘What were those words you were saying while we were making love?’

  ‘Just a way of making it more powerful. More intense.’

  ‘Words can do that for you?’

  ‘If you believe them, yes, of course they can.’

  ‘So it is real.’

  ‘Define real. We all make our own real. Tea?’

  Katherine got up and poured hot water from the kettle into two mugs on the low table by her desk. She brought them over to the table. ‘You’ll like this. Magic tea.’

  ‘What’s in it? Eye of newt?’

  ‘Yes. And a few other goodies.’

  He eyed it with caution. It was green. ‘How legal is it?’

  ‘Trust me. You’ll love it.’

  He took a sip. It was bitter, but not unpleasant.

  ‘What was the scandal you talked about over at Adam’s?’

  ‘I had an affair with my Director of Studies. Most of my first year. Switched to philosophy so I could be more fully his dream creature, his creation, since that’s what he taught, and that’s what he wanted.’

  ‘What’s wrong with that, in the bigger scheme of things?’

  ‘You’d have to ask his wife. I broke it off the same day he left her, poor man. That’s the danger with dream creatures. They can turn on you.’

  He sipped some more tea.

  ‘Do they have many girls like me in the Fens?’

  ‘Oh, we have lots of witchcraft. It can be pretty weird. My family has… practitioners. Cousins, aunts. But I’ve never met them. I wasn’t allowed to. I was brought up to disbelieve. And I do choose not to believe in it.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because if I did believe in it, the world would be a terrifying place.’

  ‘But Robert,’ she said, ‘it is.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘I lost my mother when I was twelve. Adam’s brother died in his teens.’

  ‘Really? I mean – I didn’t know. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Later. There’s nothing to say. Let’s try to get some material for the third act.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘We’ll ask the Weej.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The Ouija board, silly. Let’s see what it says. It’s worked before. I don’t see why it shouldn’t work now.’

  He sat absolutely still, staring at her. This was nonsense.

  Katherine brought a round board out from behind the screen and put it on top of the table. Letters of the alphabet were arrayed around the rim, black on a crimson background. She sat down opposite him, a water glass in her hand. ‘Do it with me.’

  He didn’t move.

  She giggled. ‘There’s nothing to be afraid of. It’s not real. It’s just our unconscious. It’s just a way of tapping into it. Have some more tea and do it with me.’

  Reluctantly, he joined hands with her as she intoned an incantation.

  ‘Be Adam,’ she said. ‘You think it’s complete nonsense too. You do it to keep me happy.’

  ‘You want me very muchto be Adam, don’t you?’

  ‘If you’re very good, maybe we’ll do some real sex magick later. I love saying that. Sex magick. You’ll love it. I’ll make love to both of you.’

  He had some more tea and placed his fingertips on the overturned glass, touching hers.

  ‘Wait, something’s missing,’ she said. ‘I know what.’ She went over to the bed and picked up the mask and cape he had discarded during sex. ‘Put these back on. It’ll help with the atmospherics.’

  He laughed, though inwardly he felt fear.

  Katherine held them out to him. ‘Please, Robert?’

  For a moment he hesitated. But hell, it was only a game. ‘Your wishis my command.’

  When he had put them on and settled back in his chair, his fingertips once again brushing hers on the glass, she took a deep breath. ‘We can begin. We seek an answer. May we pose our question?’

  Nothing happened. He closed his eyes. This wasn’t real.

  ‘We seek an answer. May we pose our question? We mean no harm.’

  Still nothing.

  ‘My disbelief is spoiling it,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’

  Then the glass moved. Katherine began to breathe deeply, her eyes closed. The air went cold. Their fingertips were barely touching, resting gently on the glass. He forced himself to stay calm, to observe.

  The letters came one by one: Y… E… S.

  ‘Let time and place elide. We are in the winter of 1677. We are in a wooden shed, a laboratory, just south of the chapel of Trinity College. There is a fire. Can you see the fire?’

  The glass moved again. He could not see how she was moving it. But the answers were what she wanted. She was creating her own dream creature, he told himself: a spirit that quarried words and feelings from places she was afraid to visit herself.

  Y… E… S.

  ‘The fire is now, the place is here, join me and Adam… I mean, join me and Robert at that place so we can see the papers that are burned.’

  N… O.

  Now, suddenly, his head swam violently. He closed his eyes.

  ‘I cannot see the papers. Can you show me the papers? Please show me the papers.’

  F… O… R… B…

  He felt himself hurtling through space. He opened his eyes. He was sitting completely still in his chair. Katherine was breathing evenly, more heavily. Sweat beaded coldly on his forehead. The glass started up again.

  I… D… D… E… N.

  He closed his eyes. The hurtling stopped, and he was inside someone else’s mind, six years ago. Grief and guilt hit him in a tidal wave. He was lost in thoughts of a brother he didn’t have. Adam’s brother. He could not remove his fingertips from the glass. He was in the big old house in Buenos Aires, aching for Moss to come home, knowing he never would. Moss Hale-Devereaux. Dead at fourteen. There were doctors, priests, unbearable pain. Parents bitter and distant. Irremediable guilt. He wrenched his mind away.

  ‘I’m Adam,’ he said, hearing himself speak, feeling his mouth move. He heard Katherine’s typewriter pecking at the paper. He couldn’t open his eyes. ‘What’s happening to me?’

  He felt a gravity in the darkness, a dense mass drawing him to its source. Then he was lying on his back, Katherine above him, her face close to his, ins
ubstantial like mist. In Adam’s room. In Adam’s bed. She was making love to him, and he was Adam.

  ‘Time and place elide,’ Katherine said, her voice far away. ‘What do the papers say? What is the content of the burning book? Show me.’

  The glass lurched crazily under their fingertips. He heard the typewriter clacking again. He opened his eyes and met hers, and she gazed right through him in lust and fear. The glass shot to an F, then an L…

  ‘Remember this,’ she shouted. ‘Remember this!’

  A… M… M… A… U… N… I… C… A… C… L… A… V… I… S… M… U… N… D… I.

  Unbearable, skull-splitting light burst from behind his eyes. It was the light he had been brought up to fear, to deny existence to, if he ever felt it glimmer in his mind. Now it was bursting forth for the first time inside his head, exhilarating and terrifying in equal measures. The light was washing away the borders between Robert and Adam, Robert and Katherine, till all three danced together, folded into each other. He felt his body ignite with intense white flame that leaped from his fingers to Katherine’s to Adam’s. It was too strong. It was forbidden. He couldn’t stand it.

  He screamed at the top of his lungs. Enough. He kicked over the table and knocked the board and glass to the floor. He couldn’t see Katherine. He twisted the mask roughly to one side, its cords tangling around his throat. He broke one and forced the mask backwards over his shoulder. The typewriter fell silent. He leaped across the room and ripped the paper from it. He read:

  ‘MADAM I’M ADAM

  MADAM I’M ADAM

  MADAM I’M ADAM

  FLAMMA UNICA

  CLAVIS MUNDI

  FLAMMA UNICA

  CLAVIS MUNDI

  FLAMMA UNICA

  CLAVIS MUNDI.

  ‘The key to the world is a single flame,’ he translated.

  His blood ran cold. Were they words from the forbidden document? He would swear neither of them had gone anywhere near the typewriter. But where was Katherine now? He felt an unearthly connection still to her, to Adam.