The Malice Box

by Martin Langfield

  Her lips quivered. And, to his amazement, a tear ran down her cheek.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘None of your business. Listen. The marchers will be here soon.’

  He sighed with impatience. ‘I need to find Adam again, Terri.’

  ‘It’s not safe. Not for any of us.’

  ‘He needs me.’

  ‘Sometimes he acts like he doesn’t need anyone.’

  He saw the flash of pain again cross her face. ‘He hurt you?’

  She hesitated. ‘I’m afraid I’ll lose him.’

  ‘Afraid he’ll die?’

  ‘Worse. Lose his love.’

  ‘Because of what you and I did?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you regret it now?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What, then?’

  ‘I don’t know if you’re ready for this. I shouldn’t give it to you.’

  ‘Terri, what’s wrong?’

  ‘I’m losing control. I never lose control unless I choose to, but I’m losing it now.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘We’re at a crossroads. We all are. We’re all interlinked, and we’re all being changed. When you told Katherine about what we did, you did it for a reason beyond simple honesty and devotion, right?’

  ‘I did it so that Adam couldn’t blackmail me with it.’

  ‘You did what you had to do to protect yourself. Now I have to do the same.’

  She seemed to be talking to the air, to someone he couldn’t see. Convincing herself, he thought.

  The voices boomed louder as the great swaying, swarming snake of people burst into Union Square, banners waving, drums pounding, chants resounding.

  ‘Take this.’ She thrust a slip of paper into his pocket. ‘It’s your clue. Now listen: I’m in danger. I have to look after myself now. Your wife is with Adam. He still loves her. She went from you to him. Which means he may not protect me any more.’

  He grabbed her wrist as she twisted away from him. ‘ Terri! Stop!’

  But she turned his wrist over with astonishing ease, throwing him off balance, and vanished into the oncoming crowd of humanity before he could recover.

  Robert was stunned. Katherine had gone to Adam? A bark of rage and pain issued from deep in his belly. Katherine and Adam? The hypocrite! How dare she! She paid him back like this? He fought to control his breathing.

  ‘No! No!’

  He heard himself shouting into thin air. Passers-by avoided his gaze. Agonizing pain coursed through his chest, surging into his skull.

  ‘No! Damn it!’

  He felt all the power of killing, of sex, of pride, that he had gained on the Path pouring into a black place of rage. He saw himself punching Adam in the head, remonstrating with Katherine, even as Kat threw in his face the utterly irrational, hypocritical nature of his anger.

  But it was dangerous for her. Adam was teetering on the edge of evil, of giving himself over entirely to the Iwnw, if he hadn’t already. Had she no idea? Was she joining them too, to work against him?

  Suddenly he felt a shadow brush against his soul. Something had passed through him, tried to infiltrate him. The eye. Jesus Christ, suddenly he saw the eye of death staring into his eyes, and it was the Iwnw. Trying to feed on him.

  His eyes fell on a huge digital clock on the side of a building facing the south-eastern end of the park. It had fifteen flashing numbers and was part of an art installation that Robert had never fully tried to fathom. The central three numbers usually moved so fast that you couldn’t tell one from another, with the outer ones moving progressively more slowly towards the ends.

  But now all the numbers were speeding up and starting to race so fast they were just a blur. The clock was going haywire.

  An image jumped into Robert’s mind, a symbol carved into the James Leeson gravestone he had decoded: a winged hour-glass, dancing before his eyes.

  Time flies.

  The Iwnw were talking to him, feeding on his jealousy, showing him something. Toying with him even.

  The numbers on the digital clock all suddenly stopped at once, on the digit 7. Then, in lockstep, they started to count down: 6… 5… 4… 3… 2… 1… o.

  At zero, the clock burst into flames. People screamed and pointed as black smoke began to lick from the number display. A smell of short-circuited wiring drifted towards him.

  You can’t stop us.

  The words appeared unbidden in his mind.

  Instinctively he dived into the deepest, most secret part of himself and drew strength there, then filled himself with fighting, hostile light to force the parasite out of his consciousness. He felt it leave, flying back to the virtual darkness it came from.

  He staggered into the park, heading northwards, and found a place to sit for a moment. Sweat was streaming from his body.

  March organizers called for calm over megaphones. ‘The bang you may have heard was just a malfunction of the clock, people,’ one boomed. ‘Let’s keep it calm, let’s keep it cool, there’s nothing to be concerned about.’

  He looked up and saw police milling about the foot of the building where the clock was housed, outside the Virgin Megastore.

  He turned his mind back within. The Path. It was the only direction away from the Iwnw. He had to get stronger. He took out the scrunched-up piece of paper Terri had thrust into his pocket.

  Amazing turns await the lover

  Whose heart is turned towards another

  Seek a snake that spirals in

  For now it’s time to shed your skin

  Find wisdom’s gate, it’s not too late

  To conquer despair

  Pass the Trial by Air

  Chants filled the park. Bush lies, who dies? Still they came, wave upon wave of people, puppets and banners and drums, their course through the city flanked by NYPD in blue and National Guard in green camouflage.

  He tried to block the demonstration out and concentrate. There were just too many people. How the hell was he going to find anything with the square jammed with protesters?

  He tried to walk towards the north end of the park but found himself carried back south by the sea of people.

  A snake that spirals in… shed your skin…

  ‘Hell is other people,’ he said out loud, as he tried to steer himself towards the edge of the crowd.

  He edged round the fringe of the demonstration as it massed into Union Square, and eventually almost reached the Barnes & Noble bookstore on the park’s northern lip. Directly in front of him was an open area popular with skateboarders, when the Farmers’ Market stalls weren’t set up on it. Hundreds of people were milling all over. Under their feet he saw twisting, painted shapes in green, interrupted by sneaker after sneaker, boot after boot. He couldn’t see the pattern, but something about it drew his attention. He stepped closer, eyes on his feet, watching the squiggly painted patterns circle. Amazing turns… a snake that spirals in…

  He found the edge of one of the patterns, pushing protesters gently aside as he moved, staring intently at the ground and not at their faces. He wheeled to the right and then to the left, back upon himself, towards the park and back again.

  Amazing… a maze… He realized he was walking a labyrinth, a painted spiralling snake in green and yellow and red. Again he turned and turned about, almost reaching the centre and then being twisted left and right back nearly to the rim in a teasing dance. It was in a way erotic, teasing, but also childish and innocent. He felt suddenly joyful.

  At the centre, he stopped and looked south. A buzz of excitement rippled along his spine. He had followed the snake to its end, where the painted spiral split into a fork, like a snake’s tongue.

  Ahead of him was a grey stone pavilion at the park’s northern end, like the comfort station at Tompkins Square Park, a children’s playground on each side and, in its centre, an arched gate.

  Find wisdom’s gate…

  He stepped forward into the crowd, making his way as best he could
in the direction of the pavilion, allowing himself to be swept in the good-humoured sea of people towards his goal. But suddenly panic ripped through the crowd. He heard shrieks and shouts, incoherent voices mingling and rising like an ocean surge. Looking towards its source, he saw a tall, white-haired man staring right at him, a smile on his lips. Then the wave came, a current of jostling, running people that knocked his feet from under him and carried him ten feet to his right and down to the ground.

  He knew with instinctive certainty that the Iwnw had got into someone’s head in the crowd.

  Fearful, conflicting shouts went up. ‘They shot a cop! They shot a cop!’

  ‘Don’t panic! Stay calm!’

  ‘The pigs are coming! Everyone get out of here!’

  ‘It was a firework, people! Stay rational! Stay peaceful!’

  ‘Fight the pigs!’

  ‘There are children here, for God’s sake!’

  Feet kicked him, trod on him. He felt terror. He was going to be crushed. He tried to haul himself up but couldn’t. He rolled up into a ball, shielding his head, scrambling for footing. Then bodies fell on him, shrieking. The air shot out through his teeth. He was being squeezed to death. He strained to twist out from under the bodies. Children cried and women pleaded in panic as the wave of fear swirled through the people.

  With a supreme effort he freed himself, crawling and twisting, kicking and pushing others aside, and took juddering rapid breaths as adrenalin ripped through his body. The Iwnw were trying to kill him. He found shelter behind a concrete flower tub and gasped and spat in pain.

  Then he saw a little boy fall under the feet of the crowd directly in front of him, screaming. He was maybe nine or ten. Without thinking Robert leaped forward, back into the crowd, and forced himself between a sea of shoes to reach the boy, trying to protect him.

  He managed to get up on one knee. Holding the boy around the chest, he stood. He forced himself to take a deep, slow breath. Two. Then instinctively he spoke, whether to the boy or the crowd he didn’t know. ‘Don’t be afraid.’

  Once again he gave himself up to the ebb and flow of the mass as he held on to the boy, slowly feeling the power rise within himself to become the pole around which all the people turned. He didn’t know how it was happening, but instinctively he drew from the same strength that had expelled the Iwnw from his consciousness a few minutes before, and poured it out into the crowd with insistent, gentle firmness.

  He saw to his right a mother screaming for her son. He felt the boy in his arm try to free himself.

  ‘Is that your mother?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Go.’

  He put the child down and freed him into the open space. Then suddenly he was watching himself from above. The crowd swirled about him in a spiral, like the turning masses around the Kabaa at Mecca, like a roaring hurricane around its eye.

  Three heads in the crowd caught his attention, shoving through the crowd in different directions, moving away from him now. He knew who they were. He had made them retreat. Pouring the strength of earth, water, fire and air into the crowd, he stilled the people, calming them, allowing his feet to be lifted from the ground as the flow dictated. Then finally he rooted his feet in place.

  ‘Don’t be afraid,’ he said again.

  He felt the panic dissipating.

  Voices went up. ‘It was a firework.’

  ‘Everyone stay calm.’

  ‘It was the pigs!’ Boos went up at that one.

  ‘Peace, everybody. Peace.’

  When the whirling stopped, Robert found he was standing right at the centre of the labyrinth.

  He stepped forward and the crowd parted, no one paying him particular heed, letting him through as though they were a single thinking creature. No one had noticed what he’d done, except the men he was sure were the Iwnw. But he knew he’d averted a stampede. They would have inflicted whatever collateral damage it took to kill him. For a moment, he exulted in his new-found strength, and in the instinctive use he had made of it. He had risked his life to save the boy, finding the power to save perhaps dozens more. Walk the path of the Other.

  He still needed the key.

  Ahead of him was the comfort station. Wisdom’s gate.

  A metal grille stood open at the top of a flight of steps, letting him into the covered central section of the pavilion. To the left he saw gardening and maintenance equipment; to the right were the rest rooms. He looked about for any obvious niches or ledges. Nothing.

  Dulled glass bricks were set into the floor of the pavilion, suggesting there was a chamber below, though he could see neither steps down to it nor up to the balustraded top floor of the structure. He checked out the rest rooms, getting nothing but a lungful of disinfectant. Protesters were swirling calmly now around the pavilion, but for the moment none entered. He was alone, at the still point of the turning world.

  He looked down at his feet again. There was a ring of green paint around one of the glass cubes set into the floor. Looking around, he saw no other graffiti. He knelt and inspected it more closely.

  It was a primitively drawn snake, its tail in its mouth, painted around the central cube in one of the arrays of light-bricks. It seemed to echo the design of the labyrinth painted on to the pavement outside.

  Seek a snake that spirals in…

  He put a finger on the cube. It was loose in its setting. He took out his penknife and worked it free, and underneathsaw a sealed plastic bag. He scooped it into his pocket, quickly replaced the light-brick and walked out of the pavilion, back into the great wash of people. He had the fourth key.

  He let himself drift in the streets of the city, exhausted, heading vaguely north and west, trying to avoid the protesters.

  Eventually, in a doorway, he slit open the plastic bag and carefully removed its contents. There were five squares of what felt like pewter, stamped with numerals, each about one inchby one inch.

  Stacked together, they made a cube. He saw that the thin edges of each square also had numbers stamped on them, so that the cube was itself made up of 125 smaller cubes, eachmarked withone number.

  He was too tired to puzzle it out now. He put the squares away and walked on, observing the city and its people.

  After each of the previous trials, immediately after being attacked, he had felt drained of all strength, barely able to think or speak. It had been a more intense feeling of exhaustion each time. Now he felt it hit him again, even harder than before. He felt like a zombie as he walked.

  There was a fever over Manhattan. It was a humid, electric fever, a fear-fever, a super-conducting, barrier-breaking fever, one of sirens and shouts and disrupted rhythms. There were sudden rushes of vehicles, there were police motorcycles snaking up and down the island’s spine, lights glaring, and there were special traffic lanes marked in orange cones, speeding black vehicles on special missions, roadblocks where usually access was free.

  The fever was eroding distances, giving people permission to challenge one another, to berate, to confront, to seduce.

  The airship floated overhead, seeing all. For a moment he saw it as the eye of death, the stare of the Iwnw.

  There were strangers in town. People were removed from their usual paths, and new ones appeared before and around them. Excitement and fear salted the air. There was humour, and there was anger. People who would not usually speak, spoke. There was fear of attack, and there was fear of what the fear of attack was doing to people.

  There was danger, and the city was alive.

  He came to 34th Street and 8th Avenue, where police manned checkpoints in the sweltering heat to control access to Madison Square Garden, site of the Republican Convention. There were TV mobile trucks everywhere, antennae deployed, cables helixing along the shaft like the spiral stairs up the core of the lighting towers at the Lincoln Tunnel. He saw that CNN had taken over the Tick Tock Diner on the corner for the duration of the Convention, adding its own electric-red to the green-and-blue neon and chrome of t
he Tick Tock itself and the faded Deco glory of the New Yorker Hotel it was part of. The two Tick Tocks, in New Jersey and Manhattan, were superimposed in his mind: two separate but identical gateways to an imaginary, timeless Perfect Diner.

  A young woman with a nose stud and black ponytail, wearing a pink ‘Buck Fush’ button on her black unbuttoned shirt, talked up a planned demonstration and the glories of real-time text-message-coordinated protest to a reporter on the other end of her cell phone. With a smile of wry amusement he realized after a moment that she was talking to one of his own reporters.

  To his surprise he realized he didn’t wish he were in the thick of the coverage. Deep down, since he’d been frogmarched out of the newsroom, he’d felt relief. He’d been bored rigid, half asleep, dying a slow death while he built up layer upon layer of aversion to acknowledging it. In a way, the same had been slowly happening to his relationship with Katherine. The miscarriage had been killing them.

  Now he barely recognized his former self. And he knew he wanted Katherine back. This close to the great round drum of Madison Square Garden – not a garden, not square, not on Madison – it felt like all 37,000 cops in the city were within a hundred yards of him. Hot, angry New Yorkers and tourists bitched and moaned about not being able to pass. Cops politely redirected them along long blocks to the east and west, around the security perimeter. Sirens blaring, a rapid-response team tore past them a block away in a convoy of at least six vehicles, five of them minibuses, traffic cops waving them through a red light.

  He had walked himself to a standstill. He decided to go home.

  New York, August 29, 2004

  Sitting on Adam’s bed, deep into the undercover role the Watchman had asked her to perform, Katherine prayed for Robert.

  She had received no warning that the Path would entail losing her husband this way. The Watchman had said nothing about it. He’d simply given her the mission to get as close as possible to Adam, claiming to have left Robert.

  She’d built up a scenario in her mind, based on the real difficulties they’d had since the miscarriage, understanding that she and Robert would have to be apart while he walked the early stages of the Path. She’d begun to exaggerate their estrangement in her mind, even while trying to help Robert understand what he was undergoing.