‘It is fluid yet solid. It can be made when sand is struck by lightning. It is fire and earth, water and air. The Ancients coloured glass by mixing metals and metal compounds into heated, glowing, incandescent glass. Our glorious cathedrals and chapels house masterpieces of stained glass.
‘I began to experiment. I varied temperatures, hour of the day, position of the sun and moon, metallic compounds delicately heated and cooled, glass delicately mixed and heated and cooled again. I prayed, fasted, spent night after night watching carefully over my apparatus.’
He listed the metals and compounds he had used, the temperatures and stages of the process, all hidden under a veneer of alchemical code: green lion, white rose, our sulphur, sun and moon, king and queen.
‘Those who find the Stone,’ Newton now roared, ‘have since time immemorial hidden it in plain sight. Published how to find it. Always leaving an element missing, a part transposed, a defect that only the wise will see. I shall not depart from that noble tradition.’
There were more smatterings of applause.
‘This is how we pass along the secret. On that winter’s day, I cracked the mould. I had done so hundreds of times before. And pure light shone from within. A glow as soft as love, as strong as lightning. The perfect amalgam of glass and metal, neither one thing nor the other. I was dumbfounded. I stared at what I had done. And I heard these words in my soul: Flamma unica clavis mundi. “The key to the world is a single flame.” I saw the one truth. The one flame beyond and behind all else. The unfractured light at the end of the Path.’
Adam paused. He looked as though he were going to add another phrase. Katherine gripped Robert’s arm so hard he almost cried out. ‘Don’t say it!’ she hissed to herself, her eyes on Adam. ‘Shut up! Don’t say it all!’
Then Adam chose not to go on. He stepped back from the glowing drum.
‘Holding the One Truth still in my mind, I ran out of the laboratory to the chapel to give humble thanks to God. Yes, the same chapel where now you may see the statue of me. I was perhaps ten minutes gone. And in those ten minutes… because some knowledge starts fires, because a wall of fire surrounds our world and limits what we may know… a candle fell among my papers as I prayed and set fire to all the work of those months, and several years prior, and all my notes of that day.
‘Finding the fire spreading upon my return, I extinguished it with water. And when it was out, surveying my charred notes and records, I found… I had lost the Stone. One page remained, with some of my notes on the discovery. Incomplete. Charred. The Stone itself? A shattered, ruined husk.’
Adam reached into the folds of his costume and removed a sheet of paper. He unfolded it and prepared to read it. Several people in one group stood, their eyes fixed on the document.
‘Flamma unica clavis mundi,’ Adam said again. ‘O –’
His words were never heard. A deafening thunderclap sounded, and the sapling before him burst spectacularly into flame. It was a stunning effect. As it burned and crackled and spat light, the spinning drum too ignited, showering sparks on to the actors and into the audience.
As the audience began to applaud, the burning tree flared brighter, fanned by a sudden swirling wind. Then, in a violent gust, the flames leaped directly at the actors. To shouts of horror, Adam’s costume burst into flames. At the same time, two members of the audience rushed forward and descended on Adam, trying to rip the precious document from his right hand.
‘Iwnw!’ Katherine shouted.
Screaming in pain and defiance, Adam kicked one of his attackers in the stomach and punched the other in the throat, then ripped off his burning wig and ran towards the curtained-off backstage area. His two fellow actors ran to the attackers and tried to pin them down, followed by several members of the Club of St George.
Robert saw people trying to smother the flames on Adam’s costume with their bare hands. He and Katherine ran forward to try to reach Adam.
Then a sheet of blue fire shot up from the melee of people piling on to the attackers. Several people were thrown back, their clothes aflame. People ran about, zigzagging and screaming. Audience members and officers of the club ran to them, pulling them to the ground and beating out the flames as others burst into the garden carrying fire extinguishers and heavy blankets. No one could later say how, but amid the confusion and mayhem the attackers escaped.
Robert and Katherine ran round the fallen burns victims and saw Adam dive through the curtain and disappear backstage.
They pulled the curtains aside – and found no one there.
Ten people were treated for burns injuries received that night. Two were permanently disfigured, including the actress who had appeared with Adam on stage. Adam never ceased to be haunted by what had happened.
When he vanished backstage, Adam had run through a basement door behind the curtains that was invisible from the audience’s location. He had been planning to use it for a closing effect – they’d go backstage and then the curtains would open and they’d be gone. But he used it instead to get the precious document away from the attackers.
Robert had no idea what to make of what he had seen. He interpreted it as an attack with incendiary devices or flares of some kind, for reasons he couldn’t fathom.
He and Katherine had gone to hospital with Adam, where he was treated for mild burns on his arms.
Later, Robert and Kat had spoken while they waited to hear about the condition of some of the other victims. ‘ There were people in the audience protecting Adam, or he would have been far more seriously hurt,’ she told him. ‘But there were others who shouldn’t have been there. Somehow they infiltrated the club. None of us detected them. They wanted the secret of the Stone, but not for any good purpose.’
‘Who are they? A band of arsonists? A rival club?’
‘They are no joke, Robert. They are most commonly called the Brotherhood of Iwnw.’
‘Younu? And what’s this secret of the Stone nonsense? Surely you don’t still believe in all that undergraduate game-playing crap?’
She took his hand and squeezed it, looking into his eyes. ‘Robert, you should get out of here. Get home. I’ll look after Adam.’
Robert knew she was sending him away to shield him from something she was afraid of. He didn’t want to leave her.
‘Can I do anything to help?’
‘One day. Not now. Good night.’
New York, August 30, 2004
Robert walked west on 25th Street, following the GPS direction finder, his throat pulsing with pain. He could feel his strength waning again, more violently than on any occasion before, yet a soaring sensation of harmony still reverberated in his body and mind. He marvelled at what he had done, however much it had cost him. And, above all, he had saved Katherine.
Contending emotions broke over him in waves as he forced his leaden legs to keep moving forward. The Quad was pointing him further south-west. He walked along Sixthto 21st Street and turned right, past the sad, tiny Spanishand Portuguese Synagogue Cemetery. He marched west along the course of the old Love Lane, long ago subsumed into the Manhattan grid.
Kat still loved him, of that he was certain now. But, in still staying with Adam and trying to bolster the dying strands of goodness in him, she was risking everything. The Iwnw could get into her too. Adam could prove too strong for her.
Robert emerged at Ninth Avenue opposite a 1960s concrete stilted building with a bowed frontage. The General Theological Seminary. To its north, an array of small two-storey wood-slatted buildings looked like they had dropped into Chelsea from 150 years in the past.
The Quad pointed him insistently into the grounds of the seminary.
Exploring, he found a gate into the gardens on 20th Street. It was huge. He’d had no idea. He sat on a bench in a cloistered red-brick courtyard garden, just like those at the old Cambridge colleges, an oasis.
His mind ran loose as he sat still and tried to absorb all that was happening.
Directly in front of h
im was the chapel, two panels of Christ’s life in each door. To his left was a beautiful stone house, its front covered in vines, with chimney-type towers set at 45 -degree angles, suggesting an inward fifth point. The house itself was Number 5. It was a place of harmony.
Exhaustion was pounding him now. Images floated up into his mind from the night of the fire in Adam’s room, when his life and Adam’s and Katherine’s had become entangled for ever. It still stirred dread in him. For two decades he had never spoken of it, shunned thinking of it. What was he still afraid of?
The answer lay behind a closed door at the end of a corridor more than twenty years back in time, and he acknowledged again that the idea of opening it paralysed him with fear, that beyond it were things he had silenced for all of his adult life.
What was behind the closed door at the end of the corridor?
For twenty years he had espoused the sceptical mind, the empirical approach. Dismissed what he’d seen as a figment of his mind, of an overwrought night of drinking and sexual tension and confusion.
But he knew better. He remembered the figure of death floating over Adam and Katherine. He remembered looking into it, into the paralysing, staring eye and its rippling blue-and-yellow flares of light.
It spoke to him. It said: Who areyou?
And, knowing it had come for Adam, he said: Adam Hale.
And the figure had turned its wrath on him and been… confounded. Shattered and dispersed.
Robert knew, beyond any doubt, that he had seen it, and that everything that had happened that night was real. Robert bore the gift that his family had sought to stifle in him, out of love, out of fear of where it would take him. But, on feeling the power of his gift, he had recoiled in terror.
Now he realized: he had not been ready. Horace and Katherine and Adam had all been right to protect him. He felt a wave of gratitude towards them, and a powerful sense of clarity and purpose. Suchlove must be repaid. Now it was time to put aside fear and to become fully who he was. To bend events to his will. For the sake of all those who needed him. To reclaim his gift.
The Quad buzzed. The clue.
Find the power of five, to keep us alive
If you follow the signs, you’ll be tilling the vines
A north-easterly flue is a smokin’ good clue
Asserting your will, will do you no ill
But surrendering more
Will show you the door
Seek balance at the core
He walked over to the right-hand chimney of the stone house and sank his fingers into the dirt, below the nearest vines. He had to dig deep and quickly, but he found it. Plastic bag. Film container. Small glassy-metal shape. A segment of a pentagon.
He staggered back to the bench and almost blacked out.
With every atom of his being he wanted to force himself to his feet to go to protect Katherine, help them all, stop the detonation. Yet he recognized the pattern: after each acquisition and use of a new power, he had to recover his strength and absorb what he had learned. He had to demonstrate that he understood.
He lurched to his feet and managed to find a cab, settling on a fat fare again to New Jersey. He slept all the way to his house.
Once home, Robert went to his Manhattan map with a ruler, pins and thread, and drew the latest version of the shape he was forming on the city, and on his own soul.
He also ran a line from the obelisk at St Paul’s north through the Worth Monument obelisk opposite the Flatiron and continued it north…
‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ he said out loud. ‘Horace, we need to talk.’
He tried the old man but got no reply. Then he turned on the radio to catch the Convention news.
It had begun today. Senator John McCain and former Mayor Rudy Giuliani were to speak. In the morning NBC had broadcast an interview with President Bushin which he said he didn’t know if the war on terrorism could ever be won. Now there was frantic spinning going on to clarify what he’d meant.
Robert dozed. At some point he heard Giuliani: ‘On September 11, this city and our nation faced the worst attack in our history… On that day, we had to confront reality. For me, standing below the North Tower and looking up and seeing the flames of hell and then realizing that I was actually seeing a man – a human being – jumping from the ioist or 102nd floor drove home to me that we were facing something beyond anything we had ever faced before… At the time, we believed we would be attacked many more times that day and in the days that followed.’
Robert looked back to that day. He remembered his fear. He remembered his anger. He looked deep into his heart. He was fighting different people, but the same questions applied. How to understand, without excusing? Against hatred, what response? Against evil, what weapons?
He fired up his computer and went briefly to the website. He wrote:
What the fifth cache said to me
Be your own weather, through intention.
Today I understood this line.
As we advance along the Path, we must balance the forces of earth, water, fire and air. The point of balance shifts and moves constantly. Clinging to any one point tears you apart. Balance must be constantly reacquired or it will destroy itself. If we align ourselves with the ebbs and flows of nature, we can acquire the strength of nature and even channel and direct some of nature’s own power. This is the power of ether – seeing the interconnection of all things, and our connection to it.
There is a living, shifting border between order and disorder, the point where creation happens. In achieving balance, my will becomes powerful. My intentions come true. I make my own weather. I begin to create my reality around me. Yet the force of ether must not be used for my own gratification, or it will turn on me.
Today I felt for the first time that it was possible – no, necessary – to face down Iwnw with a different currency than their own. I saw the possibility – no, again, the necessity – of finding a form of weapon that they cannot convert into fuel for their own strength. It is impossible but also unavoidable. Unthinkable but also ineluctable: only a form of forgiveness can stop the detonation of the Ma’rifat’. But it must be a muscular form of forgiveness. I want to destroy the Iwnw.
Within minutes, a comment appeared.
Robert, the choice to be made is this: do I choose to align my will – my ability to co-create the world – with my own desires, fears and needs, with my own desired outcomes? Or do I choose to trust and align my will with the divine will, with the will of the Path, no matter where it leads, forsaking my own desires, including even my own fundamental desire to live?
The Iwnw can be defeated only by love. Even you cannot find the love to vanquish them for ever. But we may yet thwart them in their current work. You have passed the Trial by Ether. You have done well. But many dangers now face us. Be ready. Tomorrow brings the penultimate test.
The Watchman
A Martyr’s Love Song: The Making of
the Ma’rifat’
What was done to me should not be done to a dog, much less a human being.
As soon as they had me in the van they hooded and sedated me. I felt a prick in my arm and then lost all track of time.
I know I was taken from the van and that I stood in the fresh air for a few minutes in an open, exposed space. My wrists were bound with a loop of plastic. I could smell a chemical that I thought was kerosene. Then I was put on a plane.
I tried to shout that I was an American citizen and received a hard bang on both ears at once that made my head ring with pain. To be hit when unable to see, hooded and bound as I was, is terrifying. I did not dare speak again.
I had always known that the Mukhabarat in my own country and its neighbours had no qualms about torturing prisoners. But I had come to believe that there was no such American Mukhabarat.
I do not know exactly who interrogated me, but it was not the FBI of Eliot Ness. I do not think it was even in America. But I am sure those who did it were Americans. I have lived among them long en
ough.
I was kept hooded, naked, in a room so cold I could not stop shivering. My genitals shrank to almost nothing. At intervals I could not predict, I would hear a door open and smell the perfume of women. Women’s voices would comment, in English and Arabic, on the small size of my genitals. They laughed at me, mocked me.
I dug deep into myself, to the core of my dignity, and tried to remain whole. If I had passed secrets at all, it had been to protect my blessed father. I had tried hard to minimize the potential damage of my actions. I had chosen to fail as a recruiter of my colleagues, rather than to learn how to compromise and blackmail other human beings. I had not sinned, though I had certainly broken the law.
But I was an Arab man with skills in nuclear physics. You cannot make a bomb from the work I was doing at the laboratory, though the energies we explored were massive. Not with Western science.
But no one seemed to care. Arab nuclear spy. Ride him hard.
I tried to use my pulse as a clock, to reckon the passing of time. But at times it seemed to race, at other times to plod lethargically. I think they put something in the food, to deny me even that means of orientation.
Loud, violent rock music would start playing at unpredictable intervals. Then silence would fall, sometimes interrupted by men entering my room and shouting incoherently at me; other times by the women; other times not at all.
Sometimes there was a chair in my room to sit on. Sometimes it was not there. Usually I had a bedroll, though sometimes not. A bucket was provided for my physical necessities. But they would move it, so I never knew where it was, except by the stench.
Eventually my hood was removed, for questioning sessions. I saw the women who had mocked me, mostly watching with a sneer. The men and women wore no insignia, and wore black. Sometimes the women wore medical coats.
The Malice Box Page 29