The Malice Box

by Martin Langfield

  ‘Nothing at all, old man. So, you’ll attend?’

  Robert checked the date again on the invitation, breathing deeply as he did so. ‘Absolutely, yes. I’d love to.’

  ‘Excellent. Since you were in at the conception, so to speak, you’ll be an honoured guest.’

  ‘What’s this club, by the way? I’ve never heard of it.’

  ‘My grandfather was a member. One or two other friends too. It’s a bit like the Special Forces Club, or the Explorers’ Club, only a bit more… esoteric. You’ll see.’

  And so the first and only performance of Newton’s Papers took place on a warm September night in a walled garden behind a highly discreet private club near St Bride’s Church, just off Fleet Street.

  It was not at all what Robert, or Adam, had expected.

  New York, August 30, 2004

  As Robert walked northalong Lexington Avenue after leaving GBN, the Quad buzzed with a text message from the Watchman. At last. He’d been unable to reach Horace the previous night to tell him about the keys. It read simply: ‘Waypoint X69.’ The GPS programme showed it was over on the far East Side, near the veterans’ hospital at the end of 23 rd Street.

  Robert had no time. He wanted to engage the enemy. All he could do was burn through the rest of the stages of the Path as quickly as possible, and pray he could recover some of the remaining keys. He felt light-headed with joy at sending the lawyers to hell. What an extraordinary manoeuvre by Horace! He’d always imagined him leaving worldly matters to Lawrence, but there was clearly more practical know-how to his old friend than he’d imagined. He started to dial his number, but remembered just in time that he’d still be at the funeral.

  Standing at the corner of 52nd Street, where Marilyn Monroe’s dress had been so memorably blown up by the air from the subway grate in The Seven Year Itch, he raised his arm and a cab appeared immediately. He told the driver to drop him on the southern side of the hospital on 23 rd Street.

  When he got there, the Quad pointed further east and north. Puzzled not to have received a clue yet, he walked towards the East River along 23 rd, the VA Medical Center to his left, coming to an elegant turn-of-the-century pavilion marked men over one door and women over the other. It was a free public bathhouse, now repurposed as the Asser Levy Recreation Center.

  The Quad led him past it, further north. Robert walked to a deserted children’s playground and basketball court.

  Now the clue arrived. Robert imagined Horace sending messages at discreet moments during the funeral.

  The first of three, to make a five

  To stay the course, to stay alive

  Seek stepping stones that cross no river

  Fish and stars, but do not dither

  You seek the hidden door

  Seek balance at the core

  To pass Ether’s Trial,

  Try hopscotching a while

  Robert stood and stared at the playground, letting his mind wander till he saw it: from the kids’ slide to a drinking fountain there was a series of circular stepping stones, like jellyfish in the sea.

  He walked over to inspect them: they were carved with semi-zodiacal motifs, about forty stones in all, of different sizes. There were crabs, fishes and sharks; conches, nautilus shells and starfish, all following a wavy, snakelike path.

  He walked the stepping stones from the slide to the drinking fountain, which was broken. Then he turned and walked back down again, stepping first right, then left. Maybe kids did play a kind of hopscotch on them?

  One of the stones wobbled slightly as he put his foot on it. It was a smaller one, a five-pointed starfish. He kneeled and gently pulled on it to see if it would move further. It lifted like a lid, and underneath was a sealed plastic 3 5-mm film container.

  ‘Bingo,’ he whispered.

  He took it and carefully replaced the stone, stepping firmly on it to try to settle it. But inside the cylinder there was nothing.

  ‘Fuck!’

  The Quad buzzed again almost immediately. ‘Then go to Waypoint 090. As soon as you can. I feel Katherine is in trouble.’

  It pointed him west, along 23 rd Street. There were no cabs to be had. He ran back to First Avenue in the sweltering heat for a cross-town bus that was just about to pull away, cursing and praying in equal measure. He launched himself at the bus door as it closed, jamming an arm in and forcing the driver to open it again.

  London, September 1990

  Robert took the Circle Line to Blackfriars and walked to St Bride’s Church, then spent several minutes wandering around the backstreets off Fleet Street, wondering whether he’d somehow misread the invitation, before finding the unmarked entrance to the Club of St George on Whitefriars Cut.

  The modest, understated exterior of the house hid a sumptuous lobby, flagged in chequerboard squares of black and white, where a uniformed doorman checked Robert’s invitation and ushered him to a small library, where sherry and snacks had been laid out.

  ‘I hope I’m not too early,’ Robert said, seeing there was no one else in the room.

  ‘You’re in perfect time, I’m sure, sir,’ the doorman said, with a former policeman’s intonation. ‘Mr Hale said we should expect you.’

  Soon other guests arrived, tuxedoed or in evening gowns, and Robert eased his social discomfort by inspecting the bookshelves and firmly clutching his sherry glass until spoken to. The library was heavy on medieval romances, translations of Persian and Arabic poets, and explorers’ expeditionary tales. He also noticed several books on heraldry.

  Snatches of foreign tongues reached his ears. Czech? Polish? He recognized some Portuguese, Spanish, French. An urbane man in full Arab garb switched easily back and forth from polished English to the beautiful metres of Arabic.

  Soon about sixty people were in the library, with as many again mingling in the lobby.

  ‘See anything that interests you?’

  He turned to see a very tall man with prominent teeth and iron-grey hair in a formal military uniform, a buxom redhead on his arm. She smiled at him as his mind raced to remember who they were.

  ‘Hello,’ Robert said, playing for time.

  ‘Knight to knight, come forth,’ the lady said. ‘You beat us, remember? Omnia vincit amor?’

  ‘Good God.’

  Then a gong rang, summoning the audience to their seats.

  New York, August 30, 2004

  Robert got off the bus at Madison Square Park. Before him rose the Flatiron Building, its triangular wedge pointing north, the undulations in its long face like ripples of stone frozen in time.

  He walked to the corner of the park by the statue of William Seward, the man who had bought Alaska. There was a story that Seward had been a smaller man than the tall, lanky figure shown in the sculpture. But the artist, angry about being paid late or not enough, had used a torso of the rangier Abraham Lincoln he’d sculpted for another project and simply appended Seward’s head. The story fell into Robert’s ‘too good to check’ file.

  Following the Flatiron’s line uptown, he turned right. The Empire State Building reared directly ahead through the trees, ten blocks north, and closer to Robert a flagpole drew his attention. He walked to its base and smiled with recognition as he saw the five-point star carved into its base over the words an eternal light and, at the top of the pole, a five-pointed lamp in the form of a star. It commemorated military dead in World War One.

  ‘After the square comes the pentagram,’ he said into the air. ‘Tomorrow I predict the Star of David. What will seven be?’

  He tried to fathom the significance of the numbers and shapes in the Path. First a circle, then a vesica piscis made of two circles, then the site of the Triangle factory fire and all those triangular plots of land, producing a pyramid key; then the cubic key at Union Square. One component added to the geometrical shape with each trial. Did it symbolize that he was growing, increasing in knowledge and complexity, even as doom approached? Did it reflect the equipoise between building up and tearing down t
hat was going on within him, or perhaps the balance between his growth and Adam’s corrosion?

  He had to focus. As soon as there was a chance, he’d ask Horace. No new clue had come. He turned away from the park and looked west, scanning for anything that would help his quest. He saw something he’d observed dozens of times before and never truly seen until that moment: in the middle of a large traffic island, where Broadway and Fifth Avenue crossed, rose a fifty-foot obelisk.

  He felt the city wheel about him, pinned on him as though he were its axis. Shapes and alignments formed in his mind and rushed past his imagination faster than he could perceive them. He saw a vertical line right along Manhattan’s spine, crossbeams from the East Village to the West Village and now from the starfish stone to this place of pentagrams to… where? It would have to be Chelsea on the West Side…

  The shock of the vision left him staggered and dizzy. It left as quickly as it had come.

  He breathed deeply in and out. He didn’t know how to hang on to such flashes of insight. The harder he tried, the more it receded.

  Frustrated, he crossed the street to inspect the new obelisk, trying still to reconjure the image.

  The obelisk at St Paul’s Chapel suggested that a body lay beneath it when in fact there was none. This one, he saw, made no bones about what it covered. Beneath a rendering of a severed arm wielding a sword, the plaque read:

  Under this monument lies the body of William Jenkins Worth, born in Hudson, NY, March 1, 1794, died in Texas, May y, 1849

  The site was ringed with ornate ironwork, also in the form of swords. The monument was erected in 1857. Honor the Brave, exhorted the stone plinth, which was also marked with two five-pointed stars.

  Adam had shown exceptional courage, and now, he felt, Terri was doing so too. Yet he could feel years of built-up anger at Adam coming to the fore. He felt the futility of letting fear censor what he said and thought and felt.

  He had to meet Adam and find a way to turn the tables.

  Adam was both the enemy and the ally. How long could he hold out against the great corrosive force that was slowly taking him over? One more day? He felt in his heart that Adam could still be saved. Which Adam was still in love with Katherine, if Terri was telling the truth?

  The path back to Kat and to helping Terri was the same. He felt a pang for Terri, always in control and now, he saw, utterly terrified of something, wounded and alone, probably for the first time in her life. Dependent on others. Closing his eyes, he saw her in his mind’s eye as spiritually aflame, fearful, trying to shield herself from Adam and from the darkness within him.

  Something had gone terribly wrong for her. He felt dread.

  What had she been hiding from him? Closing his eyes and trying to reach out to her with his mind, unsure how to tap his new powers, Robert got insistent images of the vesica piscis, two circles forming from one, four circles from two, eight circles from four… cell division… the words formed themselves in his mind.

  Oh, God. She had to be. Cell division… since Friday. Pregnant by him. Surely not. It couldn’t be. He tried to look deeper. Dear Lord, no. She’d said there was no chance… there was a shadow over the cell division… darkness and fear attends this division… He lost the words that were forming, jumping back out of the streaming river of information he had dipped into without knowing how.

  If Terri was pregnant, he felt no link to what he had seen, no sense of connection. Could the father be not him but Adam? Still a cloud of malevolence hung over the images. If she wasn’t pregnant, then… He lost the thought.

  If Terri was afraid of Adam, it could only mean he had tipped further towards evil. If Adam was still in love with Katherine, that meant Terri felt displaced. Unprotected. She had described in their first conversation on AOL how Adam had protected her from a bad place. Now he was not protecting her. How far gone could Adam be? If it was his own child, surely he would not turn from Terri, if he had a strand of humanity left in him. And if he had truly crossed over, then Katherine was in terrible danger from Adam, whatever skills she had been able to revive.

  The full strength of his feelings about Adam over more than twenty years came barrelling into his mind. The constant sense that he would one day do more harm than good. Always his arrogance in assuming that he could get away with outrageous stunts when others couldn’t, that his unique capacity to mesmerize would carry him through when lesser souls struggled in the mud. Always the feeling that all those dazzling gifts would end up being wasted, thrown away on some madcap scheme, gambled and lost for a thrill. Deep down, despite Adam’s generosity, despite his genuine care for others, despite his ability to disturb lives in good ways, Robert had always been angry at Adam. Jealous, envious and angry.

  Walking around the obelisk, he searched for any more details that might help him. He found little but a list of battle honours. He took out the Quad and googled Worth. Was there something he was missing? The only thing he found was that a relic box had been set in the cornerstone of the monument, like the Garibaldi statue time capsule in Washington Square Park. For a moment the image seemed to want to tell him something; then he lost it.

  He crossed 25th Street and walked further along Fifth Avenue, drawn by a flag with a large P emblazoned on it. And just past the corner he saw what it represented: at Number 204 were the offices of a design firm called Pentagram, with its name carved right into the building above the door. Another five. It gave him gooseflesh.

  Suddenly the Quad buzzed. He activated the earpiece, and then Adam’s voice was in his head. His heart pounded.

  ‘Robert,’ he said. ‘Quite a pickle we’re in, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘You fucker. You’ve got a great deal of explaining to do.’

  ‘When have I not had, Robert?’

  ‘This isn’t a game to me, Adam. Where is Katherine?’

  He was speaking out loud into the air, as though Adam were right there all around him in the sky.

  ‘Nothing’s ever a game to you, Robert, that’s one of your problems. Where do you think Katherine is? She’s a free spirit.’

  ‘I want to talk to her and hear her voice.’

  ‘You think she’s with me?’

  ‘Don’t lie. Don’t fuck around. I know she is. She went to you after I told Kat I’d slept with Terri. And I bet she has the fucking keys. All of them. Which means you do. So you got what you wanted. Are you really trying to set this thing off? It’s really going to happen, isn’t it?’

  Adam fell silent for a moment. Robert could feel his anger. No, not anger. He closed his eyes and held Adam in his thoughts. Darkness. Fear. It was raw fear.

  ‘Robert, she’s not with me at the moment, I’m afraid. We’ll arrange something very soon, I’m sure. I need to explain a few things.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Where to begin? There was this woman –’

  Robert snorted. ‘There’s always a woman, Adam. The clock is ticking. I want Kat. Where is she?’

  Adam was silent for a few seconds in a way that seemed wounded.

  ‘I will tell you everything. Everything. If you just give me two minutes. Listen to me for two minutes.’

  ‘Is Terri pregnant? Why is she scared of you?’ Anger flowed through his words. ‘You arrogant, self-centred fucker. We’re out of time. You can’t hang on. You’re not superhuman. We have to stop this thing from happening! Give me Kat. I want her back!’

  ‘You should have thought about that before,’ Adam quipped. ‘And if you want to survive the fifth trial, I’d rein in that nasty temper. Take it as a tip from one who’s been there before you.’

  Robert paced in the street, speechless with rage.

  Then Adam shouted: ‘You have no idea what I’m facing. Truly no idea. I will give you Kat. In two minutes. But listen to me first. For two fucking minutes! Or you will never hear from me again.’

  Robert breathed deeply, willing his anger away, trying to control himself. It occurred to him that Adam thought this might be his last
opportunity to tell his story.

  ‘OK. Two minutes. You have two minutes.’

  Adam paused, gathering himself, calming his tone. Robert crossed back towards the obelisk.

  ‘Let me start again. After the performance of Newton’s

  Papers, with the dreadful things that happened at the end of that evening, I broke with Horace, my mentor since I was eighteen years old. And things got weird.’

  Robert absorbed his words.

  ‘They weren’t weird before? I mean, you apply a different yardstick of weird than most people, you should realize.’

  ‘Listen to me. I want you to understand. Horace watched over me at my grandfather’s request, once I began to show signs of aptitude for the Path. They’d worked on an intelligence mission together in World War Two, the one that led to my grandfather’s recovery of the Newton manuscript. I have walked the road that you are walking, though far more slowly. When we met at university, I was really just beginning. Those games of the night of the fire were my first attempt at orchestrating experiences in a way that would reflect the complexities of the Path, the way it works on many planes at once – mental, geographic, symbolic, existential, psycho-spiritual…’

  ‘Go on. When are we talking about?’

  ‘Early 1990s now. I told Horace I didn’t need a mentor, didn’t need a master, I was going to walk the Path alone. I lost my mind around that time, you may recall.’

  Robert thought back. Adam had suffered a breakdown in the early 1990s, it was true, during his ill-fated tenure at GBN, after the Newton’s Papers affair. Then, claiming to be haunted by Isabela, he’d uprooted himself and returned to Central America, got into trouble there, taken up an itinerant life.

  ‘You weren’t well at the time, Adam. But listen. This had better tell me something I can use. We have no time, if I’m going to help you.’

  Still he struggled to control his impatience. He could feel exhaustion behind Adam’s mock jauntiness. Pain and exhaustion, and an indomitable will holding it at bay.