‘I wasn’t well, it’s true. Walk with me a moment, would you? Look around. Can you see west along 25th Street? Lovely church, Serbian, St Sava. I derive solace from it. Nourishment. Look east? The first two Madison Square Gardens were at the north-east corner, the ones that were really on the square. Second one had a stunning tower, based on the Giralda in Seville. Just like the Biltmore. What else do you see?’
‘The MetLife Building.’
‘It’s based on the Campanile in St Mark’s Square, you know that? 700 feet. World’s tallest building between 1909 and 1913, when…’
‘… when the Woolworth Building was completed downtown.’
‘Very impressive. Also known as 1 Madison Avenue. In 1908, before it was finished, one of the New York newspapers installed a huge searchlight in the tower to signal the result of the presidential election of that year. The beam would swing north for Taft, the Republican, south for Bryan, the Democrat. Imagine that.’
The north–south axis along the length of Manhattan flashed into Robert’s mind again, fleetingly. He still couldn’t see the full figure. Was Adam trying to help him?
‘And next to it, to the north? What do you see, Robert?’
‘Also MetLife. Great Deco hulk, 11 Madison, covers an entire city block. Lots of Masonic flourishes, I’ve always thought. Where is this leading us?’
‘Oh, you’ll get Masonic flourishes later, if that’s what you like. This one is twenty-nine storeys; it was going to be a hundred, but they crapped out when the Depression hit. It would probably have been the tallest in the world too, if they’d stuck to the original plan.’
‘Why are you telling me this?’
‘About MetLife? So basic a riddle.’
‘What?’
‘So basic a riddle. MetLife.’
He pronounced it oddly. With the slight distortion of the phone, it sounded as if he’d developed a lisp.
‘Are you having trouble talking straight? I don’t have time for any more riddles. Talk to me.’
For a third time, Adam said it, exaggerating his pronunciation even more strongly. ‘So basic a riddle, met lice.’
Robert felt a wave of compulsion suddenly envelop him, an urgent plea. Remember this. Remember this. He fixed it in his mind.
‘OK. I hear you.’
‘So I came to the New World. Montreal, New York, Miami, Las Vegas. Nine years ago.’
‘Vegas? Doing what?’
‘Winning money, mostly. Very odd. Had a couple of good nights. Never been able to hang on to it for long, to be honest. But it helped me fund myself. I decided to see if I could fuck myself to death.’
‘You wanted to die, or you wanted to fuck a lot?’
‘A bit of each. I was actually trying to create my own Tantric practice. That tells you something about my ego. It had to be something suited personally to me, but also something I might enjoy, something where the deprivations were things I didn’t mind giving up that much. So I gave up smoking. Took up with a lady who was into it. Sexual exploration to the end of the road. Near where you are now, actually, on 27th just past the Gershwin Hotel, there’s one locale… group sex for couples. Wild times.’
‘Thanks for the information. What’s the point?’
‘Remember everything I tell you. There’s method in the madness. They always say you can drive yourself mad if you don’t have a mentor or guide in these spiritual quests, someone who’s trodden the path before you… and I spent several years without heeding my mentor. I’m afraid I got myself into terrible trouble.’
‘You were surprised that the divine wasn’t to be found at orgy clubs?’
‘I’m giving you the short version. There was far more to it than that. Retreats. Long periods of abstinence. Meditation. Breathing control. Discipline. Study. Do you remember the Unicorn game back at Cambridge? Many years of vulning. Many years of bosing, but the ground you are bosing is your own soul. They are the same thing. Some people even come at it using pain, power exchange, fetish play. Not my cup of tea, certainly. But there are different paths. And you see, it can work. It really can.’
‘What can, Adam?’
‘These things are kept secret for a reason. There’s a path in every culture, in every religion, a hidden path, usually, reserved for special adepts, hidden behind codes and denials and rigorous disciplines. It unleashes powers of the mind and soul we didn’t know we had, Robert. The names vary. Sufis, Kabbalists, Gnostics… The Christian mystics like St Teresa or St John of the Cross glimpsed it.
‘What they have in common is an ascent of the soul that’s a descent into yourself, a knowing of yourself that somehow leads to a knowing of the divine… but it also unleashes a lot of other things, for those who don’t entirely understand what they’re doing, like me. And it attracts attention… oh, yes. It draws the attention of those who have followed the same path for reasons that are far from good and altruistic. People like the Iwnw.’
‘They found you? Back then? And this hidden path you’re talking about, is it the same one I’m on now?’
Adam snorted in anger at himself. ‘Yes, they found me. As for the hidden path, this is what Horace taught me. There is a single Path, though there are many ways to approachit. The approachyou’re taking is among the most arduous and dangerous. The Path contains the true inner meaning of all the great religions, which ossify over time, losing touch with all but their outer shell. Its adherents do not advertise, do not proselytize, but when someone is ready for the Path, a teacher finds them. These people are called by many names at different times in history, but Those of the Perfect Light is a common one. Around the world, they have private, discreet groups of supporters. The Club of St George is one. This is also the secret core of what the alchemists sought. Making gold from lead, or finding an elixir of life, were by-products, or even just metaphors, for reaching the highest level of the Path, where consciousness becomes so refined, and so powerful, as to be able to mesh with matter, control it, manipulate it. It is a goal achieved by very few, though many try.’
‘Is the Path good? Or just neutral, depending on what use we put it to?’
‘It is good, Robert. It says things that make no rational sense, because they come from a place far beyond reason. It says, for example, that love is the most powerful force in the universe, that love is the universe, and that the universe dwells within each of us. But each of its stages has a shadow side. And that is where the Iwnw dwell. Like the Perfect Light, they have representatives in the world, or adepts, if you prefer.’
‘And they found you?’
‘They did. I let them in. I had to go back to Horace and beg him to take me back, to forgive me and to protect me against them. This was in 1997, about a year before that event I pulled at the Biltmore. He helped me rid myself of them. In return, I’ve helped him track and fight the Iwnw ever since.’
He heard Adam suddenly breathing hard, taking quick, sharp breaths. He was fighting something off. Something dreadful. The Iwnw were squeezing the life out of him, trying to break through and control him completely.
‘Adam?’
‘Keep walking. Walk towards the Flatiron, then back around the obelisk.’
He walked. ‘Talk to me, Adam.’
‘Round you go.’
He reached the southern end of the traffic island and turned back north, towards the odd low green granite structure behind the obelisk. It was unmarked, with metal doors and grille windows set in the sides. Lush plants grew in the garden next to it, around the Worth Monument. He rounded the corner of the structure at the north end of the island. And there, smiling but white with pain, wearing a cell-phone mike/earpiece, his hands in the pockets of his jacket, was Adam Hale.
London, September 1990
An audience of fewer than 200 people – Robert later learned there were 170 numbered invitations – drifted out into the walled garden behind the club and were ushered to their seats. It was a perfect evening, warm, with a light breeze.
The seating was arran
ged in an L on two sides of the square, just as Adam had intended nine years earlier. The bricks of the wall were thin, the size of slim paperbacks: they looked far older than the rest of the club. Three ornate wooden chairs formed a crescent facing the angle of the L. Two had small lecterns like music stands in front of them. A single sapling stood in the centre of the square, perhaps three feet tall, a low table covered with a dark cloth next to it. The far angle of the garden, behind the chairs, was screened off with black curtains to form a backstage area.
Robert, having enjoyed a basic desultory chat with the Knight and his Damsel while queuing to take their seats, now lost them as they were directed to the other side of the garden. They had joined the club a couple of years after university at Adam’s invitation, they’d told him, describing it as an organization that sponsored archaeological digs and expeditions to exotic parts of the world.
He was placed at one extreme of the L, an empty seat next to him.
A gong sounded three times to signal the performance would begin shortly.
Then Katherine slid into the seat next to Robert.
‘This is very exciting,’ he said.
‘More than you know,’ she replied, looking worried. ‘ This is a big deal for Adam.’
‘How so?’
‘You remember the Newton document? Adam took an oath while he was at university to protect it. You remember we talked about it, that night.’
He tensed involuntarily in his seat. ‘I remember almost nothing of that night.’
‘I know. Take it easy. He swore the oath to his mentor, an old friend of his grandfather. Part of the oath is that every certain number of years, those protecting such documents or knowledge are required to share them with the world. But they must do so in a way that only those worthy of the knowledge may understand it. It’s Adam’s time to keep his oath.’
‘You mean the Newton paper Adam’s grandfather recovered in World War Two?’
‘Yes. This club is a society that helps to protect such secrets and tries to find others lost to time. Some members are in it purely for the exploration and the history, but others know its true purpose. It’s a safe venue for Adam to fulfil his oath. But not everyone agrees that this is the way Adam should do it.’
‘Sounds like crap to me. Can’t he just hand it over to a museum and be done with it?’
‘It contains powerful secrets, Robert.’
‘Nonsense.’
The gong sounded again. The polyglot murmuring subsided, and an actress in her early thirties came out from behind the curtains, wearing black trousers and blouse. Robert recognized the woman who had taken the role of the Tart at the founding of the Unicorn Society nearly a decade ago.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, Sir Isaac Newton,’ she declaimed, and bade the audience applaud as the curtains opened again and a bewigged figure in seventeenth-century costume strode out briskly to centre-stage to receive the ovation. It was Adam, grinning with delight and glorying in the applause. A third actor, also clad all in black, followed him through the curtains and urged the audience to clap louder.
The actress brought a book up to chest height, and read from it in exuberant fashion:
‘Newton’s eye sublime
Marked the bright periods of revolving time;
Explored in Nature’s scenes the effect and cause,
And, charmed, unravelled all her latent laws!’
Her companion did likewise:
‘Nature, and Nature’s Laws, lay hid in Night.
God said, “Let Newton be!” and All was Light!’
Adam joined in at the climax: ‘I’m in Westminster Abbey, you know!’
The applause melted into laughter, and then Adam brought them down to silence as the other actors stepped back and took their seats.
‘I’m an adjective,’ he said with pride. ‘A unit of physical measurement. A byword. Newtonian. And what world does my name describe?’ He made a sour face. ‘Clockwork.’ He gave the audience a long, cold stare. ‘Godless clockwork, no less.’ He shuddered. ‘Not a world I can live in.’
He wheeled on his heel and went to sit down. From his chair, grumpily, he continued: ‘I voyaged through strange seas of thought, alone.’ The two backing actors pronounced Wordsworth’s words with him. The effect was spooky.
The performance alternated monologues from Newton and brief readings of documents and letters by his backing actors, with scenes played out dramatically by all three.
They raised a laugh by staging the story of the apple falling on Newton’s head, and supposedly inspiring his insight into gravitation, with a small mannequin placed under the sapling. They told how the whole thing was an invention of Newton in his old age. They quoted John Maynard Keynes, purchaser of Newton’s long-hidden alchemical papers in 1936: not ‘a rationalist, one who taught us to think on the lines of cold and untinctured reason… not the first of the age of reason’ but rather ‘the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago… Copernicus and Faustus in one.’
In one scene, Newton spoke of the full scope of his vision of the world, and of his sadness at becoming a byword for just one fragment of it, the scientific method, to the exclusion of the rest. The scene pitted Newton against a young atheist physicist. ‘You created everything I believe in,’ the young man told him. ‘You banished superstition. You showed that the human mind, through observation and experiment and reason, can understand the universe without recourse to cave paintings, thunder gods and poring over bird giblets!’
Newton turned to the audience, angry and frustrated.
‘You see what I created? I thought I was knowing God, not killing Him. We could coin a new Newton’s Law. We’ll call it the Law of Unintended Consequences.’
‘You showed that it makes no sense to speak of God. Reason does not require fairy-tales to fill the gaps where it has not yet penetrated. God is a pathology, the fruit of our fears, nothing else. You taught us that!’
‘I did no suchthing!’
‘Science measures what is real. The rest is just mumbojumbo.’
‘You little smatterer! You godless whelp!’
The young man didn’t let up. ‘You cleared the way for the death of God!’
Newton thundered, beside himself with rage, almost in tears: ‘Blasphemer! Remove yourself from my sight!’
The actor sat down. Newton stepped closer to the audience. ‘I sought knowledge,’ he said, and his voice seemed to rise from the depths of his soul. ‘I walked the Path. Knowledge lies shattered in this world, strewn in fragments, like a butchered body, its limbs dispersed to the four winds. But we can find a piece here, and a piece there, and fit them back together. I invented nothing. I rediscovered a few fragments of knowledge, and pieced them back together. There are thousands of other fragments lying all around, hidden from our unseeing eyes. Hidden in plain sight, mind you.’ He knelt down, in a posture of prayer. ‘I sought to live in unfractured light, in the Garden of Eden, folded in the love of God,’ he said. ‘But I also found that, in walking the Path, some knowledge is forbidden. We discover knowledge that can destroy the world.’
At that moment, all the lights went out.
New York, August 30, 2004
Adam stuck out a hand to shake Robert’s. Instinctively, Robert took it and a force like electricity tore through him. Adam held on to Robert’s hand for dear life, supplication in his eyes even as his nonchalant smile stayed fixed on his face. Robert closed his eyes. He saw a dark shadow against darker light, and mutely beseeched it to recede.
Adam let go and slumped back against the curved wall of green granite. An octagonal window in the main metal door contained a card giving a number to call in case of alarm malfunction.
‘What is this?’
‘It’s the entrance to Water Tunnel Number One,’ Adam said.
&n
bsp; The image of the tunnel’s course flashed in Robert’s mind. Union Square Park. Madison Square Park. Then it would go on to… he saw it. The Manhattan axis flashed into his mind again.
‘Today is five,’ Robert said. ‘Pentagram. Five-pointed star. I’ve done one through four. Yesterday was the square. Tomorrow will be six, Star of David, at Bryant Park. The New York Public Library.’
‘Think of it as the Shield of David. You’ll need it. But remember, the waypoints just help you get to where you need to be.’
‘What’s on the other side of this? What’s left when this is over?’
‘Hopefully we are. Thank you for helping me. The scavenger hunt. The Path. This is what it’s about. Over time I developed certain powers. They are incidental to the spiritual path, they come only when you’re no longer impressed by them, and when you accept the responsibilities that come with them. To the regular mind they would be called supernatural, though they’re simply part of our nature hidden to most of us. Powerful intuition is one. Working with Horace to oppose the Iwnw helped me to detect a man working at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island. They have the particle accelerator there and a host of other powerful machines for advanced physics research.’
‘I’ve heard of it. I know what you did.’
‘Then you’ll know I tracked and eventually challenged this individual. He had built and was intending to detonate the device. The Ma’rifat’. It was to be a 9/1 i-type attack, but far worse. Something more like Hiroshima. On August 14, 2003 I hunted him down out on Long Island. Fought with him.’
‘I know about that. How did you survive?’
‘I didn’t, necessarily. I’m on borrowed time. I was powerful enoughto shield myself, but…’
His voice cracked. He clenched his teeth. Again Robert felt the force of his will, like a mighty generator. Thrumming. Crackling.
‘I became entangled. So did Terri. I wasn’t pure enough. Fear. Guilt. My brother’s death. He died down an old well, did I ever tell you? We were playing in the garden. Wrestling, fighting. He trod on a rotten wooden cover, over a well no one knew was there, and fell in. Knocked himself out and drowned. Not my fault. But I had gateways left open, and guilt over Moss was one of them. The man I killed grabbed me when he died in the blast and held one of them open. He became a Minotaur, a lost soul, psychically powerful but dependent on another to survive. Other beings are forcing their way through the gateway now. The Iwnw. The Minotaur has become the gateway for them. They want to feed on me. They resonate like a harmonic musical note with your DNA and slowly colonize it, hiding in the junk DNA, slowly turning you into them. I’m trapped, and they’re compelling me, so help me God, to detonate the remaining device. I can’t hold on much longer. The only thing that’s helping me hold it at bay is this.’ He removed the Malice Box from his pocket and brandished it.
The Malice Box Page 27