The Malice Box

by Martin Langfield

  Die to live.

  The seventh line of the letter he had burned. The words formed again in his mind.

  Die to live.

  He attempted to understand. Then he relented, and tried to help the others by lightening the tone. ‘Actually, this is pretty cool in some ways,’ he said. ‘I can feel you guys, I can see fricking auras around you, for God’s sake.’

  Horace slapped him hard across the face.

  Terri shouted at him: ‘Horace! What the fuck?’

  ‘Even here there is temptation, and it is the temptation of pride,’ Horace said, his voice hoarse with anger. ‘Be humble, or you will be humiliated.’

  No one said another word for thirty minutes.

  Eventually Horace relented. ‘I am sorry, Robert. The primitive self fights hardest when it is closest to extinction, and the shadow of this stage is spiritual pride. There is a poem by Hopkins, one of a series called the “Terrible Sonnets”, where he is wrestling with giving up what he calls his last strands of self.

  ‘Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;

  Not untwist – slack they may be – these last strands of man

  In me or, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;

  Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.

  ‘You would do well to remember them. As we all must.’

  Robert said nothing, his head lowered. He had expected the journey to end in enlightenment, in understanding. All he could see was darkness.

  ‘I know those sonnets, Horace,’ he said eventually. ‘One of them is the only thing I can think of to express what I felt when I was hanging off the observation deck.’

  ‘Which?’

  ‘Othe mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall

  Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap

  May, who ne’er hung there…

  ‘That’s how it feels now.’

  Die to live.

  ‘Terri,’ Horace said, ‘you should tell Robert what else happened on the day of the Blackout.’

  August 14, 2003: Blackout Day

  Terri took Katherine into the bedroom, the only other room where they could sit, while Adam sat at his desk, eyes closed, and began deep-breathing exercises.

  She closed the door behind them. ‘Katherine, how can I help?’

  Katherine sat down on the bed and looked up at Terri. ‘What is the Boîte à Malice, exactly?’

  Terri felt Katherine’s curiosity about her as a woman. She was asking herself how Terri exhibited such power at her age, whether she was attracted to Adam, whether she was a manipulator or could be trusted. Terri also felt a powerful ambivalence in Katherine about her own long-dormant gift.

  ‘It’s a group of strong women having fun,’ Terri said with her best crooked smile. ‘We think up ways to solve problems that leave everyone feeling better for the experience.’

  ‘Is prostitution part of it?’

  ‘That’s not what I’d call it. Imagination is, and flirtation, and creativity, sure. Technological skills. Understanding money. But it’s all about reading people and seeing what they really need. We like to keep a witchy vibe, a little bit mischievous, a little bit dark and dangerous. I can read people real well. You?’

  Katherine’s inner defences were steel. Terri could see nothing she was hiding.

  ‘I was always able to,’ Katherine said. ‘I just thought it was normal. But I had traumatic experiences. I was almost killed in a fire at university. I lost a dear friend. And it died off.’

  Terri got a glimmer of a night long ago, a place of damp and cold, panic, fear, a fire. She shut off the image.

  ‘So, tell me how you used to tap into it. Before you really believed in it.’

  Katherine looked at her with surprise. ‘You can see that far back? That deeply into me?’

  ‘No, but that’s how most of us start.’

  Katherine recounted the sex magick, the Ouija board, fragments of the night of the fire that she could remember. There weren’t many.

  ‘And you frightened yourself? I certainly did when I started out.’

  ‘I was frightened to explore some of it, yes. But it was just a blip. Temporary burnout. I was burning all ends of the candle at once. I was twenty-one. Just a bit younger than you, I’d say.’

  ‘I started younger. I grew up in orphanages until I was sixteen. Life was tough. At first I used it just to survive. It’s only in the last couple of years that I’ve learned to use it to help other people.’

  ‘I need to know how to help Adam.’

  ‘Help him raise his power. Tap back into yours.’

  ‘I want to. I can’t find a way back.’

  Terri suddenly saw part of what she was hiding. Her connection to Adam was stronger than she wanted to admit, even to herself. She loved Robert, but she had been married to Adam previously. She still desired him.

  Terri saw that no outsider could ever break the bond between these three. Any woman who formed a relationship with either of these men would always be trumped by Katherine. The insight filled her with a sense of foreboding. She dismissed the thought from her mind.

  ‘Here’s what we need to do. We’re going to revisit that night of the fire, the night of your trauma, yes? Take the fear out of it. Take the power back from it. Find a way to give it to Adam for his fight today.’

  Katherine met her eyes and held them. ‘What about my husband?’

  ‘His time will come to be freed of his fear. But he can help you too, Katherine. Tell me some of the words you used. The chants you didn’t believe in.’

  ‘I thought they were just tapping into the unconscious,’ Katherine said.

  ‘They were.’

  ‘But there’s more –’

  ‘There is, but nothing’s going to go wrong this time.’

  Katherine sat in silence. Then she said the words, begining Time and place elide…

  Terri took her hands gently and repeated the words back to her.

  ‘What I suggest is that, after you leave here, you go find your husband and make love to him. Haul him out of work. Whatever it takes,’ Terri said with a smile. ‘You’re going to use these words, and take the fear from them.’

  Terri said again the words that Katherine had uttered over the Ouija board over twenty years earlier, defusing them, releasing them. Blessing them. She held an image of Katherine and her faceless husband in her mind and cast a halo of golden light over them.

  ‘Carry this light from me when you are with him,’ she said. ‘Start holding Adam in your mind now.’

  Terri opened the door. She walked out and touched Adam gently on the arm to bring him out of his deep state. Katherine followed her.

  ‘Katherine’s going to leave now. We’ve done some work, and she’ll be sending you strength for the rest of the day.’

  She held hands with both of them for a moment, letting currents of light course through their bodies as they stood in a triangle. Then she took Katherine to the door.

  New York, September I, 2004

  Robert listened in silence. So Terri had blessed their lovemaking, the day they’d conceived little Moss. Those magical incantations Katherine had used had been Terri’s idea to help her get back in touch with her gift.

  ‘And then I couldn’t bring myself to go home. He was awe-inspiring. Vibrant. After Katherine left, we took one look at eachother and just grabbed. Devoured eachother. Forget holding back the energy. Forget everything. I don’t know if I helped him prepare or not. Probably not. But he sure was going to die happy.’

  ‘Goodness,’ said Horace.

  ‘Afterwards, when he was getting ready to leave, I gave him my address. I told him not to return to his place after confronting his guy, but to come and see me. And I left him a talisman to wear. To link him to my strength.

  ‘I was home, around four in the afternoon, and suddenly I just got this enormous psychic shock-wave from Adam. Knocked me on my ass. All hell had broken loose around him. I knew he was ali
ve, but… damn. When I got up, my gift was all over the place. I was an order of magnitude more sensitive, so it hurt even to walk, to think… and then I was numb, dead, couldn’t feel my own feet. I could feel Adam, he was fighting, he was in danger, he had my power, he had his own, but it was tough, he was hurting. I could feel it, and then I couldn’t. Back and forth, like waves of power surging into me and out of me.’

  ‘This was the Blackout?’

  ‘No, the Blackout hadn’t happened yet. Then seconds later it hit. Boom. All the lights went out. Another shockwave, bigger than the first. I felt like I was plugged into an electric socket. My body ignited from the inside out. My eyes blew out. And then I just sat down and cried and cried.’

  They sat in silence for a while.

  Terri put a hand on Robert’s arm and spoke to both of them.

  ‘We have several things Adam wants. He has things we want. We should use ours as bait. Draw him to a meeting.’

  ‘We want Katherine, and the Ma’rifat’ with its keys,’ Horace said. ‘We have some of the keys, the red gold, the core.’

  ‘And we have me, and the child I may yet carry,’ Terri answered. ‘His child.’

  Robert shook his head. ‘We can offer the keys and core. That’s all. Not you.’

  ‘He needs me.’

  ‘He loves Katherine,’ Robert said. ‘He told me so.’

  ‘Katherine is not carrying his baby. He doesn’t need her.’

  Robert’s mind flared again with the image of cell division. But it had begun on Friday. And still he saw the shadow.

  ‘Terri, I need to understand.’

  ‘It’s simple.’

  Terri gathered her thoughts for a moment. Robert could feel her anger over Jay receding into the background as she focused on what she needed to tell them.

  ‘When the Blackout hit, chains of connection were made at a level we don’t ordinarily see, on a psycho-spiritual plane. We’ve talked about some of this.’

  Adam and the maker of the Ma’rifat’ had become entangled, as they knew, in a parasitical relationship, she said. But there was more. Before fighting the maker of the Ma’rifat’, Adam had made love to Terri, as she had just told them. It had been heedless, spontaneous sex, with no protection. By the time the Blackout took place, a few hours later, she had been in the incipient stages of pregnancy. She had been carrying a fertilized egg.

  ‘At the same time, you and Katherine had been making love,’ Terri said to Robert. ‘She’d done what I suggested and called you up, and she’d used the sex-magick words to take the fear from them, to restore them to you both. They are words that summon up connection at the deepest levels.’

  ‘I remember,’ Robert said.

  ‘Katherine also got pregnant that day. When the Blackout happened, she was in the same condition as me. And a twofold connection formed. First, through Adam, I was joined to you and Katherine. The circle of Katherine– Robert–Adam joined the circle of Terri–Adam–Minotaur, with Adam as the link. And second, a more direct connection was created between Katherine and me, because of the blessing session I’d held with her earlier that morning. The words still connected us, and even her skin did, for I had touched her and was still in touch with her. Some of her DNA was on my skin, and I was resonating with her, just as I was with Adam.’

  ‘Adam talked about this. He said the Iwnw can work through DNA too. Resonating, setting up harmonics.’

  Robert heard the screeching of the birds at the edges of his mind. There should have been harmony, but he couldn’t hear it.

  ‘I can set up harmonics too,’ Terri said. ‘They use it for evil, but it’s a particular gift of the Path of Tiresias too, which is the one I follow. Remember the caduceus, which in mythoriginated with Tiresias before being given to Hermes. The twin snakes along the shaft represent, among other things, the twin helixes of DNA and the ability to work with it.’

  Robert protested: ‘No one understood DNA until the 1950s!’

  Horace interrupted them. ‘In the sense of using machinery to examine DNA, tease it apart, manipulate it in dishes and so forth, you are correct that these marvels have only come to us in recent years,’ he said. ‘But the Ancients knew more than they are credited with. Some adepts of the Path have always been able to visualize DNA, resonate with eachperson throughit, even affect it psychically. It appears in the visions of shamans, in the mythology of snakes bearing wisdom.’

  The squawking, screeching song of the birds in Robert’s mind grew louder and more discordant. Pulsing light throbbed behind his eyes. He tried to will it away.

  ‘The connection between you and Katherine. Go on.’

  ‘There was a connection between the potential lives too. Between the two eggs, both fertilized, neither yet implanted in the womb. And…’

  Robert felt an unexpected wave of pain and shame flare from Terri. ‘I remember seeing a dance of fire,’ he said. ‘Burning figures of each of us. Flames and shadows. I saw you, me, Katherine and Adam. There was another man, Tariq. And a shadow I thought was Moss, or the possibility of him.’

  ‘For a moment the two eggs were connected, superimposed. Time and place elide. They shared the same space.’ She took Robert’s hand. ‘That was the moment, the moment of the Blackout, when the Iwnw connected with me through Adam. They got into the egg’s DNA, messed with the cell structure and turned it from life to death: cancer. And there was a transfer of light, of life force, between Katherine and me at the same time. My cancer absorbed most of the life from your future child,’ she said. ‘That’s why Katherine had a miscarriage a few months later. I’m so sorry. It just happened. There was no intention.’ She broke down in tears, sobbing wretchedly.

  Robert thought his head would split apart. Cancer. And he had babbled to her about pregnancy, as if he were some kind of magus, some kind of visionary.

  Part of him still could not believe the things he was learning. Terri was saying, in a way, that she’d killed Moss? No. The Iwnw had killed Moss.

  ‘Terri, there’s something I don’t understand. These events were over a year ago?’

  ‘A year and two weeks.’

  ‘I’ve seen shadows over you. Around you. Cell division. But only since Friday.’

  ‘They froze the cancer as soon as they created it. Or said they had. To mess with our heads and hold it over us as a threat.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To encourage Adam to obey them when they called on him. For a year, nothing happened. We even thought they might have been lying. And then they unfroze it five days ago. To reinforce the fact in his mind that I will die in a few days if he doesn’t ensure the detonation of the Ma’rifat’. They claim they will reverse the cancer and protect us from the blast if he does that.’

  ‘Do you believe them?’

  ‘Adam seems to.’

  Even in the light of day, Robert felt shadows of night all around him. Evil creatures lurked there, baying and screaming. Yales like the ones on the gate of St John’s College. Gargoyle-like monsters of vicious intent. He saw even more clearly the level of evil he was preparing to fight. He swore he would do whatever it took, to his last breath.

  ‘Horace, did you know about this?’

  Horace reached forward and took Terri’s hand. ‘Yes, I have known for some time. Adam and Terri asked me if I could help. I’m afraid it has been beyond my powers to do so. Even the Perfect Light cannot always undo what evil has done.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me? Can’t doctors do anything?’

  ‘I did not feel you were ready. And no, they cannot even detect the incipient cancer. Terri has been told by conventional medicine that it is all in her mind.’

  ‘I felt it resume the day after you and I were together,’ Terri said, wiping her eyes. ‘Then on Sunday I found Katherine at the apartment I was sharing with Adam. I always knew that if he took up with her again, he’d leave me. He wouldn’t be able to help himself. I felt I couldn’t count on him to protect me any more. I went to the only people who could
help me, my witch friends at the Mischief House. They took me in.’

  ‘Were they able to help with the cancer?’

  ‘No. Robert, my highest hope is that I can help Adam hold on long enough for you to defeat the Iwnw and somehow save us. Adam, me, the child. All of us. You’re the only one who can.’

  At that moment the Quad rang. It was Adam.

  ‘Hello, Robert, time for us to meet again. Bring your friends.’

  Robert lost it. ‘If I ever see you again, it will be the last thing you ever do! Where’s my wife?’

  Horace motioned for him to calm down and to put the call on speaker so they could all hear it. Robert ignored him.

  ‘Was that you up the top of Rockefeller Center, you fucker? Was that you who broke that guy’s neck? Feel like a big man?’

  Terri snatched the phone from him and pressed the speaker button.

  ‘I know nothing about that,’ Adam said. ‘Last time I saw you was at Grand Central. You nearly killed me.’

  ‘I should have.’

  ‘You chose to do the opposite. I should express my gratitude.’

  ‘I thought I saw good in you, still. I guess I was wrong.’

  Silence. Robert thought he heard Adam’s voice choke.

  ‘Regardless of that, we need to talk,’ Adam said. ‘Cleopatra’s Needle. The Central Park Obelisk. We need to trade.’

  Horace nodded frantically for Robert to agree.

  ‘Perhaps. The core. I have it with me.’

  ‘And all the remaining keys?’

  ‘All the ones you don’t have, yes.’

  ‘I want Terri.’

  ‘No. The core, in exchange for Katherine.’

  ‘No deal. I’m done with Katherine, you can have her. But I get Terri and the core.’

  ‘Not a chance.’

  ‘Then goodbye.’