The Malice Box

by Martin Langfield

  The Watchman had said she’d know when to begin her run to Adam without his telling her.

  And then Robert’s confession had hit her like a thunderbolt. After that, there had been no need to play-act. She’d been given everything she needed to be convincing. It was at once a shrewd move by the Watchman and a form of punishment – so she took it, in her anger and pain – for her part in causing everything that was now happening.

  She tried to still her mind, looking back on the past year and the events leading up to the impending attack.

  Two days before the Blackout, she’d received a frightening email from Tariq. It was the first and only contact she’d had with him since handing him over to the interrogators. He was free, he said, and wanted her to meet him in Las Vegas, at the Luxor Hotel, at 6 p.m. on August 14. He had some very important information to give her. The message had resonated with anger and fear.

  She had gone to the Watchman and told him.

  The Watchman had contacted Adam, who for months had been tracking the potential attack. He took it as a tip that the detonation would take place on August 14. It seemed to show Tariq wanted her out of town that day.

  And so she’d helped Adam prepare to face him, and then Adam had gone and fought Tariq, and killed him. He’d brought the Watchman a PDA that he took from Tariq, and the Watchman had handed it on to her. It had been of a kind she’d never seen before. Seals within shields within seals.

  For a year she’d worked on cracking its codes.

  She’d found a ghost programme of hundreds of three-digit numbers.

  One string of numbers seemed to denote longitude and latitude. But when she’d looked them up on a globe, they’d proven to be mostly in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, hundreds of miles from anywhere.

  Eventually, she’d seen patterns in the three-digit numbers. She found a programme that linked the digits to the longitude and latitude numbers. They were waypoints for a GPS unit.

  She knew something of Tariq’s mind. She knew how playful he could be with words, with numbers. She found a file of ridiculous-sounding doggerel of the kind she and he used to improvise for fun when she was wooing him. Then she saw that each one was related to a waypoint.

  She got the feeling – sickening and heartbreaking at once – that Tariq had been thinking of her as he’d put together the intricately structured codes.

  Still she worked.

  The sequence of the waypoints puzzled her. The presence of an X in certain numbers ate at her imagination. In groups of four, the numbers added to 252. But there was something else she wasn’t seeing.

  Her last breakthrough, the one that had started the clock ticking, had taken place just over a week earlier.

  She’d realized the Pacific Ocean longitude and latitude points were mirrors of points on the other side of the globe.

  She’d linked all that data on the PDA and run a programme to strip out all the codes and encryption. It showed that, when the calculations were done, all the waypoints were actually in New York. In a very specific pattern along Manhattan.

  And as soon as the programme had displayed all the linked data correctly, the PDA had lit up and issued its distress signal. For several seconds it gave off a burst of energy on an array of wireless wavelengths, then started to erase the data she had uncovered.

  She didn’t know what the signal had contained – whether it had transmitted the decoded information, or broadcast her location, or somehow primed the Ma’rifat’ to explode. It might have simply warned an unknown partner of Tariq that the seals had been breached on the PDA, or something else entirely. Fortunately she had copied the decrypted data on to her own computer. And she couldn’t shake the feeling that Tariq, in one way or another, had wanted her to have it. So that she’d know what he’d done? So that she’d see how badly she’d hurt him, to drive him to build such a device?

  She’d told the Watchman immediately, and he’d moved quickly to consult Adam and put together a plan of action. Robert would be made to walk the Path of Seth. It was the only way. She hadn’t fully realized what it would entail, just how destructive it would be.

  She was hurting Robert by walking out on him, she knew. She’d always intended to deceive him at this stage of the plan, and that would have been bad enough, but necessary. Now, after he’d slept with Terri, she felt that the hurt she’d inflicted was justified and deserved. For the first time in her life, she cursed and prayed for a man at the same time. Robert, you bastard. Get through this so I can kill you myself. She half meant it.

  Katherine’s first proper meeting with the Watchman had taken place more than twenty years earlier, after the night of the fire at Cambridge, when he’d helped explain to her what had happened to them. He’d spoken of his mentoring of Adam, of the need to protect Robert. Their Ouija board session, he’d explained, had gone so badly wrong because of Robert’s presence, because of his unacknowledged psychic power. Her previous sessions had been harmless, well attuned to her own abilities; but Robert had served as a hidden magnifying lens, unbeknown to either of them. Their innocent thoughts and slips of the tongue – wishing he was Adam, confusing the two men’s names – and the emotional intensity of the evening had acquired huge resonance, attracting forces that ordinarily would have been kept at bay. At the level of reality where psycho-spiritual entanglement took place, where time and place were fictions, they had been linked for ever: Robert, Katherine and Adam. Robert’s jealousy and insecurity had twisted through a loophole in the world, starting the fire in Adam’s room. And, briefly, when the fire had threatened to kill Adam and Katherine, a manifestation of Iwnw had been attracted: the eye of death. Robert, somehow, had dispelled it.

  She hadn’t fully understood then. She’d remained in sporadic touch with the Watchman through the years of her secret work, though on Tariq she had not consulted him. Too secret, she’d told herself. Now she wished she had.

  She knew there were parts of the plan that she didn’t fully understand. Losing Robert was killing her, and hurting him was killing her. But she would do what the Watchman asked. And, for now, that was to win Adam’s confidence, so she could stay close enough to surreptitiously give him strength to resist the Iwnw. The gamble was: could she hide her secret purpose from the Iwnw, and could she herself resist the Iwnw’s influence when she was in such close proximity to it?

  Little Falls, August 29, 2004

  Once home, Robert posted a photo of the cube to the website Terri and Adam had given him.

  The middle digit of the middle square was missing, he noticed now. If he assembled them as a cube, that meant the innermost central cube would be blank.

  He let his mind range over the numbers blearily, looking for any obvious relationships between them. They seemed random, at least to his tired mind. Then he put it in the safe upstairs with the other keys.

  He wrote some notes, trying to summarize his feelings, yearning for the Quad to buzz. There was nothing. He called Katherine’s cell phone. It was turned off. Anger made him silent. Even if she had answered, he didn’t know what he would have said to her. He left no message.

  He let his mind fill with static and draped himself in front of the TV, watching coverage of the Convention preparations and the demonstration. He saw Commissioner Kelly had announced about 200 arrests. There had been no major incidents at the big march, though a dragon float of some kind had been set briefly alight, sparking a small melee. Later in the evening smaller groups had tried to block the entrances of two midtown hotels where Republican delegates were staying.

  A news item said someone was distributing a fake New York subway map, with non-existent stations and routes, to mess with the Republican visitors’ heads.

  He saw images of police corralling protesters and journalists together in orange netting, saw the day’s placards and slogans and papier-mâché heads and street theatre.

  He watched middle-America Republicans breezily going to Broadway shows amid all the ruckus, their attitudes ranging from insouciant to
contemptuous as they blew off the protests. He saw priceless cameos, his favourite being a middle-aged woman from New York indignantly shouting ‘Get the FUCK out of this city! Get the FUCK out of this city! ’ at an anti-protest protester who was berating the marchers for aiding America’s enemies.

  He fell asleep, chuckling, with her words echoing in his ears.

  Hours later he awoke, feeling refreshed. He’d missed a text message on the Quad that said simply: ‘Post your thoughts, urgently – Horace.’

  He gathered his notes, stilled his mind and wrote:

  What the fourth cache said to me

  Sometimes the devil’s water brings life.

  I am being torn apart, yet I am growing more alive.

  I am beginning to hear and see things I would never have believed were possible.

  Since these events began, I have lost my job and been humiliatingly expelled from among my people. Tomorrow I will reckon with them.

  I have been attacked and beaten, and left vomiting in the subway.

  I have been almost drowned.

  I have been almost blown apart in a gas explosion.

  I have had the breath crushed out of my lungs.

  I have willingly broken my marriage vows and lost the ring that symbolizes them. I have insulted my wife.

  I have experienced a new autonomy, a new self-respect, then hurt my most beloved one in order to retain it. I have indulged my anger and desire for revenge, and I have dressed it up as honesty.

  Yet, in facing death, in the play of lust in my flesh, I have found strength I never knew I had. I have turned basic urges – kill it, fuck it – into spiritual weapons, those of earth and water.

  In rejecting blackmail, in asserting my utter freedom, I have added the power of fire to those weapons.

  In diving into the crowd to rescue that boy, when self-preservation would have had me stay sheltering and cowering where I was, I have, I believe, added the power of air. It is what I used, without knowing how, to calm the crowd.

  I am growing stronger as I advance along the Path, though all this strength is only lent to me, is not my own, is not for my vanity or advancement.

  It is for Adam, to help him to resist the corrosion of the parasites within him.

  It is for Katherine, to help her on the lonely road I have driven her to. If her being with Adam will help him survive these ordeals, then so be it. But I will have her back.

  It is for Terri, to help her overcome the hidden new fear I see in her.

  It is for Horace, to guide and instruct me as he may need.

  Other people are not hell. They are salvation.

  There is a shape in my mind that defies words, just as the peregrinations I have been on across Manhattan – the shape I have drawn on the city, the experiences at each waypoint – are drawing a shape in my soul.

  I am seeing connections where none were apparent, lines and images of new harmonies.

  The capacity to speak the language of the birds is awakening within me.

  All this, to defeat those who have caused these ordeals to come to us.

  I pray for my enemy, since praying for my friends is no virtue.

  I forgive myself, for everything I have done has been necessary. I ask the forgiveness of others.

  I am ready. I am alive. I will fight.

  After posting his words, he sat staring into the night, all the lights out, waiting to hear whether he had passed the fourth trial.

  Eventually Horace called him: ‘I have read your post. You are advancing,’ he said. ‘But we are running out of time.’

  ‘Have I done what was required?’

  ‘Let me tell you about the fourth trial, and about what comes after.’

  The fourth trial, he said, had brought Robert to the main crossroads, or transition point, of the Path. At Union Square, aptly named for this stage, the physically based powers accumulated so far met the higher psycho-spiritual powers not yet discovered. The motors of transition from one to the other were the air powers, or the forces of compassion.

  To pass the trial, Robert needed to have shown he was beginning to live for others beyond himself, placing his own ego and even his own chances of survival in abeyance. The trial required recovering a key in square or cubic form and finding the heart of his body of light. Without the powers of air, Robert would not survive what was to come.

  ‘So did I pass?’

  ‘The setting fire to the large digital clock was not a promising sign,’ Horace scolded. ‘There are shadow sides to all these powers, and your jealousy and anger ignited them. They also let the Iwnw get dangerously close to you.’

  ‘I know. I’m sorry. I learned.’

  ‘Be sure you did.’

  He was struck by a sudden pang of fear. ‘Did I fail?’

  ‘From what you have written, and from the fact that you risked your life to save that boy and stop the stampede, which was aimed solely at killing you, saving countless more lives, I judge that you have acquired the power of air. Yes, you have completed the fourth trial.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Don’t get cocky. We are just beginning.’

  Horace talked for a few minutes about the nature of the Path. It was about speeding up and intensifying natural processes, he said, and living them many times in a single lifetime. It was necessary for a spiritual warrior to experience the erosion of ego. All human beings underwent this, in the trials of love, of parenthood, of serving causes larger than themselves. The difference was in the level of intensity, the degree of disciplined focus and the number of cycles of refinement undergone.

  It was in part too what lay at the secret heart of alchemy: the hundreds of evaporations and distillations, meltings and coagulations, of substances in the laboratory flasks mirrored the same process in the alchemist, in the seeker of wisdom – but the substance was himself.

  Robert asked him what he should expect next.

  ‘The remaining three trials can be attempted only by an aspirant who has folded together, in creative balance, the elements of earth, water, fire and air. When the point of equilibrium is struck, a fifth element, or quintessence, is formed – then you will be exposed to the powers of ether.’

  It was here that most people fell from the Path, Horace said, for the ether represented the level of reality at which all things were connected – the level at which higher harmonies began to be fully audible, and where clairaudience, clairvoyance and clairsentience began to occur. Many simply chose not to believe it – it contradicted too strongly the world they had grown up believing in. It was the level where the language of the birds began to truly sing.

  Robert would be required to tap the energies of the ether, both by expressing in complete truth his thoughts and feelings, and in subjugating his own will – his own ego – to a will greater than his own, the will of the Path itself.

  Robert would pass the test if he demonstrated an understanding of how he could now affect reality itself by using his will, yoked to that of the Path – of how he could warp and alter aspects of the world around him.

  His dilemma would be simple: to trust, or not, the Path.

  Robert would recover a five-sided key, divided into three parts. And he would reassemble another limb of his broken mystical body.

  Robert was quiet for a while, absorbing Horace’s words. Then he asked: ‘What am I becoming?’

  Horace laughed. ‘None of this will make you a Buddha, or bring you to the level of a great teacher such as the Christ, or Muhammad. You are undergoing but one cycle in an endless ascent to suchlevels. But it might just be enough to stop the detonation of the Ma’rifat’.’

  Then Robert heard a sound in the darkened house, a muffled crack. He felt his senses light up like a Christmas tree, nerves suddenly straining, muscles tense.

  ‘Horace, someone’s in the house. I have to go.’

  He hung up and sat absolutely still in the darkness. No sound but his own racing heartbeat. He breathed deeply, trying to slow it down. After a m
oment, it settled to a firm, insistent hammering.

  He stood up slowly, trying to make no sound. Very slowly he stepped forward, heading for the stairs. He reached out with his senses in all directions, seeking any hint of who or what was in the house.

  A door creaked faintly on its hinge, upstairs. He imagined he heard breathing. Then all was quiet again.

  Katherine had kept a gun in the house, but she had taken it. He kept a baseball bat, though, near the front door. He crept over to it and picked it up. Its heft in his hands reassured him. Gripping his hands tightly around the handle, Robert stood at the foot of the stairs, ears pricked.

  No sound. His heart hammered solidly in his chest.

  He began to inch his way upstairs, placing his feet softly, avoiding the seventh step that always creaked, making his way cautiously to the top. As his eyes reached the level of the first floor, he caught a glimmer of red light, as from a torchbeam covered by fingers.

  Someone was in his bedroom, the one that had been theirs until Kat had taken a different room at the low point of their estrangement. Anger welled in him at the violation of their home. Reaching the top of the stairs, he gripped the bat handle more firmly, ready to swing as soon as he had an angle on the burglar. He walked towards the bedroom. It was not Iwnw, he felt. None of their corrosive energy was in the house. It was more like –

  Suddenly a black-clad figure rushed out of the darkness, like the darkness itself uncoiling into his face, crunching into his chin, snapping his head backwards. He reeled and fell, lashing up with the baseball bat as he went down. He made glancing contact with flesh, heard a grunt of pain. Then a kick slammed into his groin, and his whole body exploded in agony.

  The figure tore past him and ran down the stairs in the darkness, not missing a step. Then it turned and headed to the back of the house. Robert heaved himself to his feet and half fell down the stairs in pursuit. He saw the back door close as he rounded the corner, and then the figure was gone into the night. He ran to the door, but knew it was futile. From their backyard there were at least three different directions to take to escape.