The Malice Box

by Martin Langfield

  ‘She is wherever that phone is,’ Horace said. ‘It made her jump whenit rang. She was scared, then intrigued. Now she has put up a wall. She was afraid to answer it, even though she wanted to very badly. Call her again. Say it’s you and ask her to call. Say you are with me. She knows me.’

  Robert called. He saw Horace wince again. When the answer phone came on, he spoke. ‘Terri, darling, it’s me, Robert. I’m with Horace. We can help you. We can protect you. We need your help. Please pick up?’

  Nothing happened. He waited till the line went dead.

  ‘We need to start heading east,’ Horace said.

  The Quad rang as they were crossing Seventh Avenue. ‘Robert, stay away from me. It’s too dangerous.’

  ‘We can protect you.’

  ‘There’s no protection against them.’

  ‘Let us help you.’

  ‘The women here are helping me.’

  ‘Terri, I know you’re pregnant.’

  She began to weep. ‘There’s no way out… no way out for me.’

  ‘There is if we help you. Tell us where to meet you.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘44th and Seventh.’

  She was silent for what seemed an age. ‘Mossman Lock Collection, at the General Society, 44th and Fifth, fifteen minutes.’

  The General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen, founded in New York in 1785, when the British had only been gone two years and the US Constitution was still four years from adoption, was in a jewel of a building.

  Robert and Horace, still breathing hard from their brisk walk, exited the bronze-doored elevator on to a hardwood first-floor landing that curved elegantly over a hushed reading room below. The library was bathed in light from a breathtaking skylight three storeys above. Great reading lamps hung by chains from the ceiling like floating lilies. Robert and Horace followed a curving brass handrail to their left that led to a small room ranged with glass display cabinets.

  Terri was not there.

  The cabinets contained an astonishing collection of locks and keys, most of them mind-bogglingly complex. Everywhere he looked he saw an orgy of precision instrument-making in polished brass and silver. There were time locks, magic key locks, combination locks, plunger cylinder locks, examples of back-action key locks, grasshopper locks, outside-shaft locks, knob combination locks. One was labelled ‘a very complicated lock’. Great iron keys and ornately scrolled locks from the Renaissance were displayed next to exquisitely tooled pieces from the nineteenthand early twentiethcenturies that looked like code-breaking machines with numbered drums, star wheels and notched cylinders.

  Horace called him over, his eyes gleaming, and pointed in awed silence at some carved wooden instruments, their parts looking like wooden toothbrushes. This is a wooden Egyptian lock which is about 4,000 years old, the label said. Pin tumbler lock. This mechanical principle was developed by Linus Yale Sr for modern use.

  At the far end was a five-foot-tall black metal safe, painted in gold-yellow lettering. Next to it sat a strongbox of heavily riveted black iron. Robert’s mind flared with pain as his eyes fell upon it. The black bolts of the cracked bell at St Mark’s in-the-Bowery rushed at him. Mary fat Mary fat Mary fat Mary.

  Coloured lightning flashed through his eyes, blue and purple and yellow. Saw-tooth patterns like the Chrysler arcs, twisting in geometric forms, scoured his brain. Then everything went black. The heavy bolts of the strongbox had set off a terrifying string of associations in his mind that ended in a single image: a picture he had seen as a child of the early atomic bombs. Thick rivets on black metal. Fat Man. Fat Mary. Ma’rifat’. And the words quoted by Robert Oppenheimer, leader of the Manhattan Project, when he described seeing the first atomic explosion: I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.

  He stepped back in bewilderment and spun around. ‘Horace?’

  Before him stood a shape, in grey light against black, radiating black-blue waves. He blinked his eyes and shook his head. His hearing warped and squealed. His regular senses were overwhelmed, shutting down. He felt energy draining out of his body.

  ‘I can’t see,’ he whispered. ‘It’s close. The detonation is close. If we can’t stop it…’ Then slowly everything stabilized, and the greys became light grey, then white.

  He saw it was Terri standing before him, holding Horace’s hand.

  Horace flagged down a cab outside the General Society. ‘Come to my apartment. I can look after you best there.’

  Terri beamed sadly at Horace. ‘Where is your place? I’ve always wondered.’

  ‘A building that used to be called the Level Club, on the Upper West Side. Near the Verdi statue.’

  ‘Why is it called that?’

  ‘It was built by Freemasons, as a facility for visiting members from around the country. The venture went bust, though. It had some very rough years. Eventually it was rescued and restored. I’m not a Mason, but some of the building’s features have great resonance for me. Some even say it is the most ambitious effort ever made to actually reconstruct King Solomon’s Temple.’

  ‘Now I really want to experience that.’

  ‘Before we go, Robert,’ Horace added. ‘Look there.’

  Just by the entrance to the General Society, the building was adorned by a muscular arm in iron bas-relief, holding a hammer in vigorous workerly manner.

  ‘Remember it,’ Horace said.

  After Horace had finished dressing the wound on his forehead and examining his eyes, Robert got up impatiently from the sofa.

  ‘What else happened on the day of the Blackout?’

  Horace glanced at Terri. ‘I suspect that on that day, everything happened,’ he said. ‘Everything that has happened, all of this, was set in train that day.’

  Robert frowned. He could barely keep his eyes open; his entire body felt as though it were made of lead, and yet he couldn’t still his mind.

  ‘Tell me.’

  Terri spoke: ‘I didn’t see all of it. Adam overcame great fear. Paralysing. But he went anyway.’

  ‘Start at the beginning,’ Robert said. ‘Enough talking around it.’

  ‘I only know a part of it,’ Terri said. ‘Adam will have to tell you some of it.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Among other things, as I told you, it was the day I lost my eyesight.’

  August 14, 2003: Blackout Day

  Terri arrived at the apartment building on Greenwich Street at Charles shortly before ten o’clock in the morning, the appointed hour.

  Since she had a couple of minutes to kill, she crossed the street to the little white clapboard farmhouse that sat diagonally across from the client’s building. It looked like something she had seen in a children’s storybook, a long time ago. All bent out of shape and non-linear.

  It promised to be an interesting job. The client, some kind of minor aristocrat in his forties from Britain, had contacted La Boîte à Malice asking for someone with very specialized skills to help with a particular problem. Terri was the best qualified. As usual, the agency had checked up on the client and sent her a summary. It had been entirely up to her whether to accept.

  When he opened the door, her first thought was that he had a far more smiling presence than she had felt from afar; her second thought was that he had intensely magnetic eyes. The client, who went by the name of Adam Hale, introduced her to a pretty, petite woman about twenty years her senior with straight black hair and blue eyes, whose first signal to Terri was a powerful block around some core issues in her past.

  Terri recognized it because she maintained the same defence. Despite the older woman’s superficial friendliness, she also read some unease: guilt about being there, high regard for a life partner and sadness. A feeling of something lost.

  ‘Please meet Katherine Rota,’ Adam said. ‘Katherine, this is Terri, from La Boîte à Malice.’

  There was a strong bond between Adam and the woman, one that had gone on for a long time. She saw a shape of three people, bound to
gether through the years, changing combinations but always together… the third was a man, Katherine’s significant other. She saw it lasting through lifetimes.

  Hale she read as a dynamo. Energy coursed through him and from him. He was powerful but stymied somehow, and afraid.

  ‘Terri, I’ll lay this out as baldly as I can,’ Adam said. ‘I have learned of an act of great obscenity, an attack, that is being planned against this city. It is the kind of thing that would not be taken seriously by the authorities, and indeed if they were to intervene it would only make things worse.

  ‘The subject is a very dangerous person, with the ability to carry out a very serious act. He is also quite fascinating, and someone that in other circumstances I would find very gratifying to hold as a friend. However, this cannot be.’

  Terri felt his intensity wash into her. Then she felt an enormous wave of potential harm. For a moment it took her breath away. In the middle of it, at its core, was a word. She tried to read it, amid swirling patterns of pain and shame. Revenge.

  ‘Who is this man?’

  ‘His name is unimportant, but his father and grandfather, both Egyptians, had access to a great tradition of ancient knowledge, in addition to being trained as scientists in the Western tradition. They passed along the reverence for this tradition, and some of its tenets and secrets, to the boy as he grew up between Cairo, London and America. His mother is American, and he is an American citizen.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Something dreadful has happened to this man. It has caused a psycho-spiritual breakdown. This has served as a gateway for certain forces of great potential evil. I have detected him and must stop him –’

  Katherine interrupted: ‘Pause for breath, Adam.’

  Terri felt Katherine’s barriers harden even further. But she smiled at Terri. ‘He can be a little overwhelming. Would you like some tea?’

  ‘Just water, please.’

  Terri felt Katherine’s attempts to appraise her. No hostility, a neutral but searching sweep initially, now turning positive. She felt Katherine was someone accustomed to assessing people quickly, trained in doing so. She was also like a television tuned to static. Deliberately so, though she didn’t realize it.

  ‘May I go on?’

  Terri focused again on Adam Hale. ‘Please.’

  ‘In a few hours I plan to go to confront this man. I’m not strong enough to do so without help. There are forces attached to him of great power.’

  ‘You want me to go with you? As I understood, that’s not the problem I was brought in to address.’

  ‘No. Just over twenty years ago, when Katherine and I met at university, she had one of the most powerful gifts I have ever come across. I need her help now, but she can no longer tap into it.’

  ‘I see that.’

  ‘I had hoped that, at least for the next twelve hours or so, you might be able to help her recover it. Add your own power, if you are willing. I need… armour, so to speak. Or depth. A deep well to draw on. It can’t be described.’

  ‘I know. I understand.’

  She closed her eyes and drew a deep breath, holding it till it had absorbed all distractions, all incoherence, all negativity, in her being. Then slowly she exhaled, expelling it all. She held Katherine, Adam and the unnamed man in her focus, letting it spread slowly out to those around them.

  She saw something deeply puzzling. Beautiful… virginal…

  ‘Your husband,’ she said to Katherine. ‘Why didn’t you call on him? He’s…’

  She looked at Adam, saw his eyes flit to Katherine’s.

  ‘He doesn’t know,’ Adam said. ‘He has buried it so deeply that he believes he is a sceptic.’

  ‘It’s not the time,’ Katherine said. ‘Robert’s not ready, and he’s to be preserved until there’s truly no option but to call on him.’

  Terri saw the three of them again, in a chain of being, linked together and unchanging as worlds shifted and blurred around them. Adam. Katherine. Robert.

  She turned to Adam. ‘How will you prepare?’

  ‘Breathing. Meditation. Movement.’ He smiled at her. ‘Focus on my quarry.’

  She narrowed her eyes at him. ‘You want me to raise your sexual energy too. So you can build on it as a base.’

  ‘You’re doing that just by being in the room.’

  ‘I might be able to do better than that.’

  She turned to Katherine. ‘Ms Rota, could you and I talk while he does his deep breathing?’

  New York, August 31, 2004

  Robert held up his hand. ‘Can you stop for a moment, Terri?’

  Clouds of darkness and foreboding had filled his mind as he listened to Terri’s account. He strained to throw off a sense of doom. The idea of Katherine trying to help Adam behind his back, of Terri and Katherine knowing each other over a year before he’d made love with Terri, made him feel idiotic, however much they’d excluded him to protect him. His whole adult life of denial of his gift seemed cowardly, somehow.

  ‘You seriously need to rest,’ Horace said.

  Terri took his arm and led him, following Horace’s directions, to a guest room. As he lay there, curtains drawn, in the half-light, a great wave of fear broke over him, and then he melted into exhausted oblivion.

  He slept right through dinner. At some point in the night Terri brought him some soup. Then she with drew and left him to sleep his fill.

  A Martyr’s Love Song: The Making of

  the Ma’rifat’

  After weeks, I was suddenly released. There was no explanation, just a warning never to speak of what had happened to me. They knew what I’d done, they said, but I would not be charged. Simply, no one would ever again believe a word I said.

  I was dropped in the middle of Manhattan one night, in the clothes I had been abducted in, with all my belongings except my identity papers.

  I returned to Long Island to find I had lost my job. In addition to vanishing without explanation, I had been shown to have fabricated data. Pictures taken during my interrogation had been sent to my friends, to my family, showing me in compromising positions with other men.

  They discredited me as a scientist and as a man. My credit cards stopped working. I was forced to live on my meagre savings.

  I could not forgive them.

  But I could take revenge.

  Sir Isaac Newton’s third law states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. I determined now to honour that law.

  And ironically, I would use in part the formula Newton himself had passed down to me through my Beloved.

  I found my destruction as a human being had brought me capacities I had sought for years in our tradition. Inchoate and poisonous but real none the less. Malevolence gathered around me and began to feed on my soul.

  My grandfather had placed in my father’s keeping a metallic drum of exquisite design, which, as a boy, I had once been allowed to see revolve, and glow, and feel its power, as the adults prayed and chanted around it. It seemed to amplify and to broadcast their love, their spiritual rapture. My father passed it on to me, and, in keeping with his admonitions, I hid it in a secret place, as befitted a sacred treasure, until I was worthy of it. I had hoped, one day, to become an adept and learn its secret uses.

  Now, with Newton’s help, I made a copy of it. It was made of the same metal-glass that he described as the Philosopher’s Stone. Only one element was missing.

  They say that when the student is ready, the teacher will appear.

  I now came to the attention of a group of people who had felt my rage, my humiliation. For fifteen years, I had been striving in my secret studies, to transmute a tiny amount of regular gold into the kind we know as red gold. It is an alchemical operation, requiring both delicate physical treatment and heightened spiritual states. I had never succeeded. It was the one thing missing from Newton’s paper. He did not say how to obtain it.

  Now the Iwnw brought me some.

  On August 14, 200), I rose early,
intending to enjoy every last drop of the beautiful day that was dawning. As the sun rose, I stood at the open window and felt the gloy of the heavens enter my heart.

  The final preparation of the Device would be a long arduous task. I meditated for an hour. I tried to find a place of forgiveness for what had been done to me, and found none. I honoured my father’s memoy. I cursed the Mukhabarat. All Mukhabarats. Above all, I cursed the American Mukhabarat.

  Two days earlier I had sent a message to Katherine, to my Beloved. It was our only contact after I was released. I asked her to meet me in Las Vegas, at the Luxor Hotel, on the evening of Thursday, August 14, 2003. I did not intend to be there, but I wanted her to be out of New York. I did not want her to be destroyed in the detonation of the Ma’rifat’ that she had unwittingly helped me to build. I wanted her to witness it. To understand my pain. My destruction.

  After breakfasting, I took care of final routine matters. I paid bills and burned personal items. I sent a final entry to the small weblog I had kept as an enthusiast for the great Nikola Tesla, who, like me, had explored the outer reaches of phenomena such as resonance and vibration, who had warned that such knowledge, in the wrong hands, could split the earth apart, whose laboratory near Washington Square Park, like Newton’s in Cambridge, had burned down in a freak fire, who had seen beyond the limitations and prejudices of his age, and suffered for it.

  Then I went to my garage and put all I would need into the trunk.

  It was a short drive from my home to the place I had chosen as a suitable locale for the final construction of the Device.

  It was at Robinson Street and Tesla Street in Shoreham, Long Island, just a few miles from my place of work. It was the empty shell of the laboratory where Tesla planned his most audacious vision: a Radio City of his own technology that would transmit energy and information through the earth itself to all mankind. He had not been backed sufficiently. He failed, though decades later his contributions to the world would be recognized.