‘When was that exactly?’
‘The morning of the Blackout. August 14. And he swore me to secrecy. To protect you. He said he wouldn’t involve you unless he absolutely had to.’
‘And yesterday?’
‘He said somehow the person he had to fight a year ago has come back. He said somehow we are vulnerable, because since the night of the fire at Cambridge we are all… entangled, he said. What do you have that’s newer than that?’
He showed her the picture. She stared at the screen, wordlessly.
‘Adam sent me it not a couple of hours ago. He’s been drawing me into this same thing, you know that. But there’s something very… dark going on with him. I don’t believe he can control it. I don’t know if he can win.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean suppose he needs me not to stop this terrible act of obscenity but to cause it? Suppose it’s all a trick? He threatens you, but he says it’s to protect you. He threatens me…’
She looked him in the eyes. ‘How?’
He couldn’t meet her gaze. ‘Just bullshit stuff. I’m not afraid of him.’
‘You’re afraid of something.’
‘Less so than I was. I don’t know how to explain.’
‘This thing in the picture. Have you seen it before?’
‘It’s death. Foregathering. Don’t ask me how I know.’
‘You saw it the night of the fire. In Adam’s room. I know.’
His head swam with secrets, with things he had seen and denied his whole life, things he’d considered forbidden, things he could scarcely credit he’d seen in the last three days. What could he tell her? What should he say?
‘You’ve seen it too, Kat?’
‘I have. In dreams. And I felt it in Adam’s room that night in Cambridge, though I didn’t know what it was at the time.’
‘What is it?’
‘It’s malevolent. It lives in a potential world, not quite in existence but constantly seeking to exist. It feeds on pain, confusion, fear. It’s connected to free will somehow. When someone chooses to do ill, or even has the opportunity to do so, it draws near. When people stumble into psychic areas they’re not equipped to deal with, it sees an opportunity. It brings death, yes.’
‘How is it related to these people called Iwnw?’
‘I’m not sure what more I can say. Each of us has a role in this, Robert, and it has to be played out. Some things are only valuable to you if you discover them for yourself. I think, from what Adam said, that the Iwnw live in this world and the next. They have people in every generation who act for them, a kind of priesthood, if you like, and then they are also this… eye.’
‘I’m starting to understand some of this. But I need help. There are people who fight them, yes? Horace? Has he been watching over us all this time?’
‘You remember that night at the Round Church? That’s the only time you met him while he was mentoring Adam in England.’
‘Oh, my God.’
Hour by hour, his life was being remade. Nothing was as it had seemed. He saw protective forces everywhere around him, throughout his life, trying to shield him from his own nature. His parents. Adam and Kat. Horace.
‘I have to be who I am now,’ he said, not realizing he was speaking out loud.
Kat said nothing.
‘I’ve been so blind.’
She smiled. ‘No. You weren’t ready until now. One thing you need to realize is that Adam says he is shielding us. Protecting us. I believe him.’
‘I don’t know if I do, Kat. I believe he wants to, but –’
His cell phone rang. It was Horace. He kissed Katherine and walked into the kitchen to talk.
‘Robert, my friend. Are you OK?’
‘You saved my life.’
‘Only just. I was just able to tip the balance in your favour. I hadn’t realized Adam was so powerfully in the grip of the others. They used him to get to you.’
‘He’s still resisting, though, isn’t he? I felt he was fighting.’
‘Yes, but he is losing faster than I thought. Robert, you must pay attention to everything, to every internal voice, every seeming coincidence, every sensation you receive from people.’
Anger flared in Robert’s heart. ‘I’m going as fast as I can! I’ve been attacked three times! People are trying to kill me, for Christ’s sake.’
‘You’re not alone in that regard. I’m between bases too, we might say. Home is not the most recommendable location for me at the moment. If I go home, I’ll be killed.’
‘What?’
‘It is time to grow up, Robert. For all of us.’
‘I’m sorry, I –’
‘Hush. I can’t stay on for long. They’ll find me, and Adam will kill me.’
‘Adam?’
‘Just like he killed Lawrence. Or forced him to die. I will die too, if I must. To protect you.’
‘Horace?’
‘Understand, Robert: understand what is at stake here. Truly.’
‘Who are they, Horace?’
‘The Iwnw are scavengers of the soul. In this world and the next. Parasites. They are using the Minotaur as a kind of gateway into Adam. Quickly, tell me everything else that happened today.’
Robert recounted everything.
‘You must go on. You must stay in it with Adam. You must.’
‘But you said he’s going to kill you?’
‘He is battling. He is not yet lost. But his willpower is not inexhaustible. When he tires, he is not in command of his actions.’
‘Can he be saved?’
‘Yes, Robert. You can save him. And everyone. But only if you risk losing.’
‘Losing what?’
‘Losing everything.’
His mind hared in twenty directions. He let it. He was learning to trust.
‘Horace, have I completed the third trial? Have I passed?’
‘Let me gather my thoughts for a moment.’
Horace fell silent. Robert recognized something in himself more strongly than before, something he knew from his regular life, that already seemed years in the past: he was committed now. He wanted to see it through, regardless of the cost. The alternative was too awful to bear thinking about.
‘The third trial focuses on freedom,’ Horace said. ‘It places you in a situation where your autonomy and independence, your ability to stand on your own two feet and decide your own fate, are placed under unbearable pressure. These are the powers of fire, the energies that drive ambition, self-respect, the pursuit of achievement, the force of pride. This trial has brought you deeper into the nature of the race to stop the Ma’rifat’ exploding. To pass the trial, you have to discover what lies at the outer limits of freedom and pay a terrible price: entering the shadow of this power, you have to choose between submitting to blackmail or losing your wife.’
‘I have made that choice. I am going to tell her.’
‘Many aspirants to knowledge of the Path fall at this stage, in one of two ways: they either fail to tap the fire powers to create a healthy ego and sense of independence, or they fail to transcend self-infatuation. Tell me, as you reject this blackmail and establish this freedom of action, what do you see at the outer limits of freedom?’
It was the same question asked by the letter, in a different way: Seek freedom’s far bourns. ‘Absolute freedom means absolute loneliness, absolute isolation. It will cost me Kat, but I’ve had no choice but to take these actions if I’m to survive.’
‘Good. You will have recovered a key in four parts, forming a triangle or pyramid, and you will have discovered another part of your shattered body of light. If you had failed at this stage, you would have perished. I would not have been able to help you if you had not developed the strength to survive. You have passed the trial.’
Tears suddenly filled Robert’s eyes. He was exhausted, frightened and bewildered. But he was alive, and fighting, and learning what he needed to fight better. He was proud.
‘Robe
rt, are you there?’
He composed himself, clearing his throat and scanning his mind for questions. ‘One thing. I saw something that disturbed me on a church in the East Village. A head, a face, that looked… flayed? Leafy? It’s hard to describe.’
‘The Green Man,’ Horace said immediately. ‘Good. What you saw is a foliate mask. A lot of nonsense is spoken about him, but at heart there is something you need. It stands for life. Remember it. One other thing. Does the term “Water Tunnel Number One” mean anything to you?’
‘The big new one they are building? That’s going to take thirty years?’
‘No, that’s Number Three. Coming along quite nicely now, actually, with the new drills. But no, I mean Number One. Follow its path. You may find it illuminating. Now I have to go. It’s dangerous to talk longer.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘What I must do. I’m going to help you fight.’
Then he was gone.
Robert went back into the living room to his wife. He took a deep breath.
‘How’s Horace?’
‘Katherine. I’ve been unfaithful to you. I had sex with Terri yesterday.’
A Martyr’s Love Song: The Making of
the Ma’rifat’
My father was not just a scientist; he was a dreamer and a man of deep spiritual concerns. He was a teacher, a physicist, a chemist and, beyond that, a mystic, an explorer of God’s mysteries. There are no longer words in English for what he studied, though in Chaucer’s time –yes, I am a learned Arab, remember? – he would have been called an alkamystere.
Take chemistry, take alchemy, take mystey, and combine them. That is the lost science. Alcumysttie, it was later called. I sat at his feet. I learned. I have applied it.
I had prayed that 9/11 would be enough. That America would learn. That the great wave of compassion and selflessness that it provoked would last and spread into the world. But it did not. And I concluded, amid tears, that something far bigger was needed.
I love New York. Even more was required of New York. Not only to show compassion and enormous heart in the face of attack but even more, for the sake of the world: to die. This great heart had to be stopped; it had to make the ultimate sacrifice, the ultimate leap into the divine.
When the Device was accidentally triggered, I died to the physical world. But now I dwell in a place of no time and no space, where light dwells. For particles of light, there is no time, and all places are the same place. Now I am a Man of Light, and I observe the workings of the world I left as one thing. I am a newborn child. I am a dying man. I am working at the RHIC. I am burying my grandfather. I am knowing a woman for the first time. I am holding my mother in my arms. I am building the Device. I am doing and being all these things.
From here I can see everything. I can see all of us. I see the afternoon of August 14, 2003 in every single detail. I circle above the north-eastern United States like an eagle and watch the spreading fingers of the Blackout. I see the electricity surging madly back and forth along the power lines. I see the darkness metastasize. I see the world cracking like ice. I swoop down and enter bodies and feel their most intimate sensations. I see each of us connected to the others along the hairline cracks and fault lines exposed by the detonation.
I see myself die.
I see Robert and Katherine making love. I see Terri hyperventilating lost in sensation, lost to herself. I see her lose her sight.
I see Adam. I see him fighting. I see him in a burning room. Always I see him in a burning room. Always the same fire.
I see space and time bend.
I see deep into my soul. I see the flaw. I see, too late, the wrong turn I should have rectified.
I see myself fail.
There is a sculpture in the water off Battey Park. It shows sailors reaching desperately down to try to rescue a drowning man who is completely covered when the tide is high. So are we all subsumed into the sea of God when our individual fears are drowned in a greater love… when all the fear is gone, the love at the core of each of us can flow through. This is how I see the world of men from my new dwelling in light. Tiny packets of love, pinched off from one another and from the world itself by fear. All the borders in the world are made of fear. We need them so we may grow to maturity, but then we must learn to take them down again, to transcend them. What power can achieve this?
At Brookhaven, in the collider programme where I worked, we wound back the clock of time so far that we were able to create matter in a form that has not been seen in the universe since ten microseconds after the Big Bang. It is called a quark-gluon plasma, but you can think of it as simply this: a liquid universe. The ocean from which we all came. The machine we used to collide gold with gold is so powerful that, before we were allowed to go ahead and use it, studies had to be made to show that fears we would destroy the earth were unfounded. One of the concerns was that we might destroy the entire known universe. This is not a joke. The report examining these issues, and concluding it was safe for us to go ahead, is publicly available. You can read it for yourself online.
Many years ago, as I excelled in my studies in London, the men of the Mukhabarat sought me out. One does not turn down an invitation from the intelligence services. They wished to ensure I would be willing to serve, come the day, as an asset for them when I began work in other countries. All these years later, I do not even know if they were from the Mukhabarat of my own country or another.
I did not go to work for them willingly. I gave them as little as possible. Their questions were stupid, their understanding minimal. I was a particle physicist, I had no desire to work on bomb programmes or to inform on my colleagues. But eventually, in the 1990s, they asked me to infiltrate a bomb programme in a foreign country. They arrested my father to focus my mind.
I went along but I decided secretly to strike back at them. I went to the British Embassy and offered to spy for them.
Now I am a man in love, and I burn with the pains of that love. It is a thirst that never can be slaked. I am a drop of rain, and my Beloved is the boundless sea. To join my Beloved I must dissolve myself back into the great ocean from which I came. I must seek annihilation in the joy of my love.
I knew my Beloved by a different name, but she told me her real name was Katherine.
4
Trial by Air
Little Falls, August 29, 2004
Katherine sat smoking. They’d talked into the early hours.
There was frost between them, distance and pain. The hurt he had caused her stood in the room. She had cried, and Robert’s face burned where she had slapped him.
‘You were my anchor. If all else failed, there would be you.’
‘I’ve let you down. And myself.’
‘Please. Let’s just focus on me for the moment, shall we? Yes, you’ve let me down. You’ve hurt me.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I know you are. It doesn’t help in the least. It changes nothing.’
She took a drag on her cigarette and angrily stubbed it out. ‘I shouldn’t smoke. Look at me. I’m a wreck.’
Robert saw himself from the outside. He was there in the room with her, absorbing the tide of her pain, taking her blows as she lashed out. She needed him, and he wanted her to expend her anger on him. Yet a part of him remained distant and watchful, coldly gauging how well the ploy to free himself was working.
She toyed with her lighter, flicking it on and off. ‘When I decided to stay with you, I was coming out of a nightmare. Almost a decade, undercover most of the time. It was killing me, and I quit.’
‘To my benefit.’
‘I was lucky. I thought all the men like you were married already.’
‘You made up your mind pretty quickly. And you were done with danger and dangerous men.’
‘I was.’
‘And you wanted someone dependable and reliable, but not over fifty, and not your actual father.’
‘And you were safe. You made me feel impo
rtant and safe.’
‘Even with a hurricane looming. Our whirlwind romance.’
‘And do you remember what I said to you? That night in Miami?’
‘You said you would go to the ends of the earth to avoid betrayal. To avoid experiencing it ever again. And to avoid soliciting it ever again.’
‘And now what have you done?’
Robert said nothing.
She stared out of the window. Her hurt seeped into him. He let it flow. She was right, but there was more to it. She too had her portion of blame. He bit his tongue. Losing his temper would be losing control, and this was about the opposite.
‘Robert, after 9/11 something happened to me. I wanted to think it was noble, but looking back now I think it was just about revenge. It wasn’t something I could tell you about, at the time. I shouldn’t now, actually. But I’m going to.’
‘You went back to work?’
‘You knew?’
‘I guessed. You disguised it very well. But something changed about you. You became harder, underneath everything.’
‘You didn’t say anything.’
‘What could I say? I thought perhaps the spooks never really let you go. Part of me was afraid of what would happen if I asked you about it.’
She laughed. ‘Whether I’d have to kill you? That old joke?’
‘Whether you’d have to leave me. I assume you went back to the Brits?’
‘Actually no. I went to the Americans. It was the American side of me that 9/11 really hurt. I had a few contacts. I got into counter-terrorism.’
He appraised her. ‘On the analysis side?’
‘And operations. I did some tough-girl training. Got back up to speed. That yoga retreat I did? Wasn’t yoga.’
‘Were you rusty?’
‘I was the best shot in my class when I joined Six back in ’86. I was so good I got specialist training. I was still good. Very good.’
‘You’re telling me this for a reason?’
She turned cold with anger. ‘I’m sorry, Robert. Was I boring you?’
The Malice Box Page 21