Katherine returned home sometime after midnight and came to Robert’s room. She lay with him in the dark, saying nothing, inches and light-years away. It had been seven years now since she’d walked away from her career, six since they had met again and fallen in love.
Neither liked to argue, but it was rare that they would make up like this. She just lay next to him, and they drifted off to sleep, fingertips barely touching, each showing the other that they hated the deadening frost between them, even while acknowledging that it was there.
Robert dreamed they made love.
He dreamed that they awoke to find themselves making love, and that their relief and delight was so great they burst out laughing.
Then in the dream he opened his eyes and realized it was Terri he held in his arms. He willed her to become Katherine again. She wouldn’t. As Terri smiled up at him, he dreamed Katherine stood over them, watching.
‘I can’t blame you,’ she said. ‘Everybody wants Terri.’
Then he caught a glimpse of himself in the bedroom mirror. He was Adam.
He awoke with a start. Katherine was gone. His body aching, he stared into the darkness till dawn broke.
For months Adam had tracked his quarry, using the skills of the Path, sometimes working alone, sometimes directed and aided by the Watchman. Now he stood at the intersection of Tesla and Robinson Streets in Shoreham, Long Island, and surveyed the abandoned buildings. A brick tower rose above the main one, a disused laboratory, and he knew as soon as he saw it that his target was inside.
He pressed his fingers against the talisman Terri had given him, then pulled it out of his shirt and kissed it. He was totally calm, totally alive, more alert than he had ever been in his life.
It was five minutes to four.
He checked the position of the security guard. He was over by the far entrance. Searching in his mind’s eye, Adam saw his enemy’s movements that day, his arrival at the site, his entry through a disguised hole in the fence.
Adam felt Katherine’s power with him too. To her, he owed the final tip-off: that today would be the day of the attack.
Adam found the entrance and moved towards the laboratory’s ground-floor windows. He saw a device like a shallow drum, glowing softly with gold light, on a simple wooden table, and a stocky man in his late forties, his eyes closed in deep meditation, sitting on a chair before it. The man held a smaller version of the drum, of the same translucent red-gold metal, between his fingers. The rim of the drum seemed to rotate in contrary directions at once, and geometric forms traced into its sides glowed white and gold. At the limits of his perception, so tenuous that he wasn’t sure if it was there or not, he could make out a faint cloud above the Device. As it swirled in and out of visibility, he thought for a moment it was an eye.
Adam prayed. Let me stop this act of defilement from taking place, even if it costs me my life.
The man suddenly stood up and took a step towards the Device, eyes still closed. Adam saw that he was weeping. A wave of great loss, of deep hurt and anger, rippled off him. Adam moved to the door and walked in. He moved towards his target in plain sight as the man opened his eyes and calmly put down the core.
When Adam was almost upon him, the man raised a hand and planted it firmly palm-first into Adam’s chest.
In the split second before it hit him, Adam clearly saw the tenuous eye above the Device twist and melt into his opponent’s body. Then a shock-wave tore through Adam that sent him flying twenty feet across the room. Stunned, he scrambled to get back on his feet. He looked up to see the man again walking calmly towards the Device.
Adam stilled his mind. He called out, firmly: ‘Stop.’
‘No. No, no. Why stop?’
His quarry placed the core into the top of the Device, which doubled its speed and began to emit a deep bass throb. The air around it began to vibrate, to warp. Then he removed it, wrapping it in a cloth. The Ma’rifat’ slowed again.
‘It is complete. It is armed. You cannot stop it. I will take it into Manhattan now, where the fuel is richest. The greed. The fear. The hypocrisy. Then I will insert the key again. And it will feed.’
Adam stepped closer. The Device flared and spat light.
‘It is responding to me,’ Adam said. ‘I have no hate in my heart.’
‘Step back,’ the man said.
Adam took another step forward and spoke again. ‘And I have no fear.’
‘Step back!’
Adam launched himself forward, trying to wrest the core from the man’s right hand. They fell to the ground and fought. The core rolled loose, and they both lunged after it. Adam grabbed it and tried to rise but felt his wrist twisted savagely backwards. He dropped the core into the hands of his enemy, who leaped forward and slammed it back into the top of the Device.
The Ma’rifat’ began to spin again, glowing deep blue and red from within. A sound like slow thunder rippled through the twisting air.
Adam shoulder-charged him, and both men fell, grabbing at each other’s throats. They hurled themselves over and over on the ground, trying to gain enough leverage to stand. They smashed into the table and cracked one of the legs, and before either could react they saw the Ma’rifat’ slide off the falling surface and drop towards the concrete floor.
‘I have no forgiveness,’ the man said as it fell, and then the Device hit the ground and detonated.
Time and space twisted as Adam watched, aghast. A seething, swirling eye of lightning formed around the damaged Ma’rifat’, flaring yellow and electric-blue as it shot towards the two men, dousing them in fire. Adam made his mind a perfect mirror. He saw his enemy’s body atomize in a flash. Then he knew nothing.
Generating its own warped geometry, searching for fuel, for an energy it could engage with, sliding down the ladder from finer to denser, from spirit to ether to matter, the Ma’rifat’ fed on the echoes of its creator’s pain, his hatred and anger, and flared out into the world. Specks of space and time randomly distorted around the Device. Snatches of time and place became conjoined, and from the void at the heart of the Ma’rifat’ a great surge of energy flowed, arcing in the air.
But then it lost its grip on the souls it could feel all around, the great agglomeration of spirits it detected… Weakened by Adam’s calm, his stillness, its power spiralled down to become a raw electromagnetic pulse, hugely powerful but disorganized, its spiritual force diluted to a fraction of its potential. The pulse see-sawed back and forth along power lines, tripping safety systems, blowing out fail-safes, spreading like ink in water. With a surge of physical energy like an invisible thunderbolt, the Ma’rifat’ blew out all the lights across the north-eastern United States.
Robert lied to Katherine over breakfast, telling her a spurious story about trying to break up a fight in the street between a taxi driver and a customer and getting punched in the face for his pains.
‘No good deed goes unpunished,’ Katherine said. ‘You’ll heal.’
It was a role she hated playing, but already she was performing the Watchman’s wishes, settling into her secret assignment. With the genuine difficulties she and Robert had had since the miscarriage, it was not proving hard. She despised her own skill.
Robert told her of the death of Lawrence Hencott, saying nothing about Adam’s supposed involvement. As for Robert’s ignominious removal from the offices of GBN, she had little sympathy.
‘John’s a dick. He’s scared of you, that’s why he’s doing it. Sees you as a rival. He can’t think any other way. Scott will look after you.’
She announced she was going out again. ‘If you find out any more about what’s going on with Adam and that weird box, let me know. I’ll be at yoga.’
‘I’m going into Manhattan again. I need to see Scott to sign some documents.’
She stopped by the door. ‘When I worked at the Foreign Office…’
She still couldn’t say what she’d really done, even after all these years. They’d trained her to the bone and beyond.
‘… we were taught to listen to our instincts very closely. First impressions. Intuition. The hairs on the back of our necks. It could save our lives.’
‘You did well to get out when you did. I’m eternally grateful.’
‘Something about you right now feels wrong. Just so you know.’
‘Something about us feels wrong.’
‘No, I mean something new. Something very recent.’
‘Such as?’
‘You’re afraid. I’ve never seen you afraid before.’
‘Of what?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t think you do either.’
She considered him for a moment. ‘You’re a rock, Robert. Don’t stop being a rock.’
‘I am Gibraltar.’
‘Don’t get into any more fights. We’re out of peroxide.’
Alone in the house, Robert thought of Terri. There was no chance of anything happening with her. He wouldn’t allow it. But he recognized that he wanted it. It was one of the things he was afraid of. He was ready for something to happen.
He cast his mind back to the weekend he and Katherine had fallen in love.
They all convened on a Friday afternoon in the lobby of the Biltmore Hotel.
Robert, who had been covering the march of Hurricane Georges across the Caribbean for several days, was exhausted and irritable. Scores of people had been killed in flooding in the Dominican Republic, thousands driven from their homes across the Caribbean. The Keys were going to get hit, and maybe Miami itself. He’d evacuated the downtown GBN news bureau and set up a temporary operation deeper inland at the hotel. Now he’d come down to the lobby to politely with draw from Adam’s upcoming mystery weekend.
Adam, who was mostly living between Havana and Miami Beach, had invited a small group of people a fortnight earlier to meet at the Biltmore at this hour, using his customary riddles, torn postcards and invisible writing. Robert wanted him to call it off.
‘Georges is very big, and very powerful,’ he’d told Adam by phone. ‘If it comes this way over sea, it’ll hit Miami like a bomb. A big one.’
‘I know. Delightful, isn’t it? Adds such an element of doom to the mood.’
‘Promise me you won’t have people out in the streets chasing bloody clues.’
‘They’ll all be lashed to masts on Miami Beach, Robert.’
‘You’re joking?’
‘Relax, I promise I won’t kill anyone.’
‘I’m going to have to pull out.’
‘I understand. At least come down and say hello.’
‘I have a job to do.’
‘Delegate. Just for an hour. The lobby, five o’clock. Please come. People want to meet you. I have a surprise.’
Now they stood among the ornate octagonal birdcages in the cavernous lobby hall, awaiting Adam’s entrance. The finches and nightingales swooped and twittered with agitation at the approaching hurricane.
A man Robert didn’t know, beautifully blazered, twinkled at him. Robert tried from the depths of his fatigue to twinkle back but didn’t have it in him. The man introduced himself as a William, American. He was with a Penny, British, whom he’d met on a boat trip to Cuba organized by Adam the previous year. There was Carmen, a tall black Cuban-American lady, electrifyingly dressed in all white and yellow, and a watchful man of sallow complexion called Vladimir. William appraised Carmen with a moneyed leer. Suddenly Robert perceived a woman approaching him at high speed from his left.
‘Miaow,’ she said. ‘You must be the one Adam warned me about.’
‘Katherine,’ he said, smiling. So she was Adam’s surprise. ‘My God. How long has it been?’
She had a nautical effect going on, white shorts and a matelot top and tanned legs. She kissed his cheek.
‘Too long. You look tired. Busy?’
He hadn’t seen her in nearly ten years, since London. Her ill-fated marriage to Adam. The performance of Newton’s Papers.
‘Adam told me to expect a surprise but…’
Katherine looked slimmer than he remembered her. Worry lines around her eyes crinkled when she smiled, but, despite her tan and vigour, she seemed not fully at ease. Haunted, he thought.
‘How long have you been here?’
‘Posted here as bureau chief from London. About eighteen months.’
‘Any family with you?’
‘Jacqueline didn’t come. We called it a day.’
‘Oh, sorry. Kids?’
‘Never happened. You?’
‘I left the Foreign Office. Free as a bird. Oh, look, here he is.’
Adam, the self-elected shaman to his friends, appeared from the direction of the elevators, wearing a white jacket, jeans and sunglasses, looking like a gigolo. He kissed everyone kissable.
The group sought out the bar downstairs. They all liked themselves, especially when people were looking. And in their different ways they all loved Adam way too much. Feeling like the token local dullard and yearning to get back to work, Robert began whispering asides to Katherine as they settled around a table.
‘I suspect we’re the only ones with real jobs.’ She smiled and squeezed his arm and sat down next to him. ‘Vladimir looks like he was grown in a laboratory.’
All the participants had received through the mail a riddle and half a postcard in a manila envelope. In Robert’s case, his half of the postcard showed a curve of tanned flesh and a line of fabric that was probably, though not certainly, a breast in a bikini top. The riddle was as follows:
Complete the picture to a nicety, find the creature known for piety. Share a table, if you’re able, with a hottie (not for totty). The name and day are Mercury, Icks ecksive at eye.
The Pelican Restaurant. A Wednesday, Mercredi, Miércoles, the day named for Mercury. Icks ecksive was IX XIV, 9/14. Eye was I, one o’clock. Reservation in the name of Frederick Mercury.
A similarly personalized riddle had been received by Penny, which led her to the same Miami Beach restaurant, at the same time and the same table. The lunch date had allowed the two of them to join together their torn postcards, which, when combined, indeed gave a complete bikini top as well as the jumbled name of the Biltmore Hotel, today’s date and a time.
Adam framed it as a summoning of heroes from the four corners of the earth, or at least a parlour game in which those were the roles, in order to solve a great mystery.
Ensconced at the head of the table, he spoke: ‘I have asked you all to come here today because…’
Robert, his notes in one hand and a souvenir paperweight in the form of an obelisk from Buenos Aires in the other, pored over his horizontal map of Manhattan, squatting at the table’s edge to squint along streets and sight lines. He placed the paperweight, a gift from Katherine’s father, downtown at Fulton Street and Broadway, muttering to himself: ‘First waypoint. First cache. Obelisk.’
He took a box of map pins from his desk.
‘Before that, Adam’s pied-a-terre.’ He stuck a yellow pin at Greenwich Street and Charles.
‘First waypoint again. St Paul’s Chapel.’ He stuck a red pin next to the obelisk at Fulton.
‘Join the dots…’ He tied a length of string between the two pins, then squatted again and looked south-east along its length with one eye closed. He moved around and did the same looking north-west.
If something draws your attention, pay heed to it. Photograph it. Post it. But nothing leaped out at him.
He took his notebook and drew a diagonal line, imagining the full page as Manhattan.
What else? The bullet casing.
He’d been in a few fights in his time. Never sought them. But he was solidly built, and people didn’t usually mess with him. He’d taken a couple of bullies apart to protect smaller kids in his schooldays. Getting banged in the face didn’t bother him too much. But this had been different. The knife. And then the face that wasn’t there. That sickly yellow light where a face should have been and, pulsing at its core, the hypnotic staring eye. He knew it was death, stalking him through time, from the burning bedroom in Cambridge to the New York subway. The fire in Adam’s room had been rekindled, and he couldn’t put it out. Why did it want him? How could he fight it?
He focused his mind on the bullet. An ad caught his eye on the back cover of a magazine on the stack by his desk. A red dot within a red circle. A Target ad. He tore the logo from the page and pinned it through the centre on to the map by the obelisk. A bullet and a target.
Robert whispered to himself: ‘Is Adam the target? Am I? Who’s shooting?’
He picked up the Malice Box. The master key, they’d called it. ‘Let’s have another look at you too, you evil bloody box.’
He went out into the backyard, seeking some sunlight. The box resisted his initial twists and squeezes.
‘So help me, Hale, I will break your neck when I find you.’
He tried pressing lightly on the various geometric patterns traced in its sides. Nothing. It gleamed a translucent reddish bronze in his hand. The concentric raised rings on its top seemed to flip from convex to concave and back… then they seemed to turn in a slow spiral. He stared into it. Lost himself. It was like a tiny black hole. He shook his head clear. Grabbed the Quad from his breast pocket and photographed it in the palm of his hand.
Then he put it, together with the bullet casing, in the safe upstairs and got ready to head into Manhattan.
Adam awoke to find himself in darkness, facing the eye. He could not feel his body. The eye was irresistibly beautiful.
‘You have thwarted us,’ it said. ‘Or at least you have thwarted our proxy, our creature. But there is a price. Now we have entered your being. We have become entwined, through him, in your very DNA. And we have entered your seed.’
Adam became aware of the burned-out, smashed Ma’rifat’ somewhere on the floor near his feet. But the encounter was taking place elsewhere, in some deep corner of his consciousness.
An image entered his mind, unbidden: tendrils of light spiralling from one double helix to another, from himself to Terri, Terri to Katherine, Katherine to Robert, all linked as though they were one. He felt a foreign presence within himself, one he must contain, a contaminant of hatred and loss.
He saw another image, of Terri. He saw her body as though in a living X-ray. He saw a fertilized egg.
‘She’s pregnant?’
‘She was. She may yet become so again. But we are entangled now. The man you killed. This woman. You with us. We have halted this pregnancy before it begins. We have made it into something else and frozen it in time. Until you do our bidding.’
‘What are you?’
‘We are Iwnw.’
‘What is that?’
‘We have fought your kind for many years, though we are the same as you in many ways. We dwell equally in your world and the next. We reach you through the maker of the Ma’rifat’.’
‘He’s dead.’
‘He lives in you now. He is entangled with you. He is what we call a Minotaur, trapped between worlds, consumed with loss and fear. A powerful creature, become weak. He will be our gateway into you. We will not be denied. Do as we wish, at the time of our choosing, and we will reverse what we have done. Deny us, and cell division will proceed, in a form of eternal life.’
‘Eternal life?’ Adam spat. ‘How?’
‘There is a form of physical immortality available to everyone. It is caused by an enzyme called telomerase, which stops cells from dying when they are exhausted. It allows them to divide for ever. And there are some conditions in which the foetus doesn’t grow, but the placenta does, in an abnormal manner, in a way propitiated by this enzyme. It can spread rapidly to the rest of the body. Do you know what it is?’
‘Tell me.’
‘It is called cancer. We have altered the cell structure to ensure this is what will happen if we unfreeze it. And we will ensure it is of the most virulent kind, if you do not attend us when we call on you.’
‘… I need your help. There has been a killing. An unusual one. Your remarkable powers are required.’
Adam’s guests exchanged amused looks.
‘The looming hurricane has forced a change of plans… but for the killer, as well as for us. We are all confined here in this magnificent lodging for the next twenty-four to thirty-six hours. No one may leave. We are locked in together. But so is the person we each seek. Among us.’
He took some green folders from a briefcase at his feet and passed them around the table. ‘Here, among other materials, you will find a photograph of the person you seek.’
Robert opened his folder and laughed. He looked around the table and saw everyone had the same photograph.
It was a chalk outline, the kind police drew around a dead body in noir thrillers, white outline on a black surface. Sans body.
‘This was someone we all love very much. The victim fought to the very end. It was a brutal struggle. The hunt for the killer will take place inside this splendid hotel. Outside, there is nothing. Just the gathering storm. I’d planned certain outings for this event that will have to be cancelled. But we can do it all here perfectly well.’ He paused and gave a rueful smile. ‘If we survive… Now, please read through the rest of your materials and begin. Oh, and one last thing. The identity of your target is contained in a sealed envelope. Each of you has one. Under no circumstances may you open the envelope until you are ready to confront him… or her.’
Robert’s cell phone buzzed. It was his deputy. ‘The mayor’s about to speak again, Boss.’
‘On my way.’
He picked up his folder and mimed regrets to Adam. For Katherine, he jotted down his room number on a business card and slid it into her folder.
Robert returned to the lobby. The birds were shrieking and banging into the bars of their cages now. Before going back up to the makeshift bureau, he stepped out on to the front steps of the hotel and looked up at the sky. It was livid green and purple. It was starting to boil.
Katherine came to Robert’s room shortly before midnight, as the edge of Georges flayed the hotel with sumptuous rain. He was on the phone with his news editor, wrapping up coverage plans for the coming twenty-four hours. He waved to her to sit. She riffled through her folder until he was ready.
‘You look exhausted.’
‘I have six hours off now. I’ll pick it up from Mike again in the morning.’
‘They usually head straight for Miami and veer off at the last minute. This one hasn’t veered yet.’ He rubbed his eyes. ‘If it comes, we’ll know about it. This thing’s the size of Texas. Enough energy to light Manhattan for a decade. If I tell you to get into the bathtub and cover your head, do it.’
‘Will it protect me?’
‘No, but it’ll give me a good laugh. It’s full of water at the moment. In case we get hit.’
She smiled.
Robert got up and perused the contents of the mini-bar. ‘Want anything?’
‘Jack Daniel’s, straight. Thanks.’
He cracked open a small bottle of wine for himself. ‘So… what’s Adam got you all doing?’
‘Chasing clues. It’s been fun. We all just compared notes over dinner. Everyone’s all over the place.’
‘Teams of two?’
‘No, everyone’s on their own but collaborating.’
‘I’m sorry I can’t take part. I think.’
‘There are clues every few floors, starting in the basement. Want to hear one?’
‘Not now. My brain is shot.’
‘Want me to leave?’
‘Not in the least. Tell me about you. All about you. It was rumoured you became a spook.’
‘Foreign Office.’
‘Based where?’
‘Everywhere. Paris, some of the time. London. Short stints elsewhere.’
Beneath her calm, she was as tense as a wire.
‘There are things I can’t talk about.’
‘I understand. But you quit.’
‘I did a lot of work in non-proliferation. Of sorts.’ She snorted to herself, an expression of disgust on her face. Then she looked out of the window for a long time.
‘Why did you come?’
‘I didn’t plan to. It was a last-minute decision. I was thinking that Adam and I had seen quite enough of each other for this lifetime.’
‘Did you get his letter from Havana?’
Adam had written to several friends earlier in the year, after the Pope’s visit to Cuba, announcing among other things the death of his mother, his coming into a small inheritance and his retirement as a foreign correspondent. He would now dedicate himself, he wrote, purely to what he termed the Rope Trick: the pursuit of wisdom and a good laugh, though not necessarily in that order.
‘I thought he’d gone batty.’
‘Me too. Nice to see him happy, though.’
‘So this is part of the Rope Trick?’
‘He said it was a way of sharing the Rope Trick with friends. Experimental, he said.’
‘So why did you come?’
‘It was a free air-ticket. Change of scene. Adam said you’d be here. And I wanted to tell him I finally understood.’
‘Understood what?’
‘Losing someone. Having them torn away. Losing them to violence. Like he lost Isabela.’
‘What happened?’
She got up and walked to the window. She was rigid. ‘I couldn’t go on, that’s all.’
‘Your work?’
‘I ended up caring. You can never care. Not about people. Just about the cause. And sometimes you forget you’re not actually even serving a cause, you’re just serving a country.’
‘Was there something specific? A particular incident? You said you lost someone.’
‘Christ, did I ever.’
‘What happened?’
‘Clumsy. To lose someone. To fumble a life. Oops. Butterfingers.’
‘You blame yourself.’
She was fighting back tears. ‘Can we talk about something else? Tell me about Jacqueline. Or your job.’
Robert stood on Broadway outside St Paul’s Chapel at 2 p.m., looking at the obelisk through the railings. The Quad showed four satellites engaged, accuracy of 29 feet, ready to navigate.
It rang.
‘Robert. Waypoint 064.’
‘And good afternoon to you.’
‘Hi. You can take the subway to Canal Street.’
The Quad showed the new waypoint as a location in SoHo, just over a mile north and slightly west. As he walked, he was treading on stars in the sidewalk again.
Robert crossed Broadway near the giant clock at Vesey and walked north, heading in the direction of City Hall. On the corner of Barclay a green octagonal information booth offered free maps of New York. He took one, unable to resist.
The signal faded. Trying to reconnect, he walked into City Hall Park and found himself staring at polished granite slabs laid into the sidewalk showing scenes from the area as it used to look. The granite was so smooth he could see his reflection, as though he were staring through the ground directly into the past.
An image of the burning room flashed again into his mind. The past had never felt closer. He walked back to Broadway. The GPS signal returned as he reached the R and the W subway station, the gated grounds of City Hall itself to his right, closed to the public for security reasons.
The Quad now said 0.9 miles.
Something about the station entrance railings leaped out at him. A form like a fish was welded into the design. Green metal. He took a picture of it.
‘I’m going to tell you a story as you go,’ Terri said. ‘I hope you like it.’
‘I’ll let you know.’
‘Did you see the reading of Salome by Oscar Wilde that Al Pacino did last year at the Barrymore? Marisa Tomei was in it?’
‘Missed it, sorry.’
‘She did a Dance of the Seven Veils, very Middle Eastern. Made her butt shimmer and vibrate. The night I saw it she ripped her top off, flashed her breasts. It was very erotic. She didn’t do that every night.’
‘The Dance of the Seven Veils isn’t in the Bible, though the scene where John the Baptist loses his head is, of course… not everyone realizes.’
‘Hadn’t thought of that, but, yes, think you’re right.’
‘There was no Dance of the Seven Veils as we now think of it until Wilde wrote that play in the nineteenth century… in French, no less… but this story is where it comes from. It’s on a clay tablet. Very, very old. The story of Ishtar.’
‘The film version didn’t do too well.’
‘Shut up and listen. It’s the MP3 file I sent you last night. Start it as you go down the steps. It’s about what’s happening to you. When you get to Canal, take the left-hand exit and cross Broadway to the west.’
Then she was gone.
Robert found the icon on the Quad screen and clicked it as he descended past the green ironwork.
The station was a utilitarian brown-and-yellow riveted oblong box, dotted with grubby dark blue mosaics of City Hall on the far side of the rails.
Her voice was closer, more intimate, in the recording. She’d used a good microphone.
‘Hi, Robert. You’ll like this. Ishtar, goddess of love, daughter of the moon, has chosen a lover. She has taken Tammuz, the shepherd, to be her husband, and now he has become the god of fertility. Life on earth flourishes. But Ishtar has a sister, who rules the land of the dead, and she captures and imprisons Tammuz.’
The R train came. He got on and found a seat.
‘Ishtar goes to her sister’s realm, the land of no return, the house of shadows, the place of darkness, to free him. There is no way back from this road, no exit from this house, where clay and dust are the only sustenance. The dead resemble birds, in this telling. Ishtar demands entry. Her sister, Ereshkigal, perhaps in joy, perhaps in fear, orders her to be admitted.’
Robert closed his eyes and let his mind drift into the story. Entering the land of the dead… to reclaim a lost soul… that is what they were doing. Rescuing Adam…
‘The gatekeeper welcomes Ishtar to the land of the dead and opens wide the first gate. She is wearing no dress, only items of personal adornment and modesty. He takes the crown from her head. She asks: “Why do you take my crown?” And the gatekeeper replies: “Enter, my lady. Suchare the decrees of my queen.”
‘At the second gate, he makes her take off her earrings.
‘At the third gate, he makes her take off her necklace.
‘At the fourth gate, he makes her take off the ornaments of her breast, made of precious metals.
‘At the fifth gate, he makes her take off her girdle, inlaid with charms of birthstones.
‘At the sixth gate, he makes her take off her bracelets and anklets.
‘At the seventh gate, he makes her take off her final undergarment.’
Robert smiled, holding the erotic image at a distance. Terri was stripping for him? She’d narrated it deadpan, but with just a hint of mischief at the edge of her voice. Was he going to let himself be seduced today? He’d never been a philanderer. He just wasn’t that kind of guy. He’d resist. He had to. That’s what the trial had to be.
‘Thus Ishtar is naked when she meets face to face with the queen of the dead. Ishtar immediately attacks her sister. The seven judges of hell turn the eyes of death upon Ishtar. Ereshkigal unleashes upon her a host of diseases, like a pack of hounds. Ishtar dies, and her corpse is hung upon a stake. The earth lies barren. Fertility dies. Man and woman sleep alone. The bull does not mount the cow, and trees and plants do not quicken.’
Wow, Robert thought. Erotic charge dispelled, no problem.
‘But Ishtar has left word that if she does not return from the land of the dead after three days, she must be rescued. The messenger of the gods, seeing sterility all around, speaks with the sun and moon, and pleads with the god of wisdom, to restore fertility. The god of wisdom forms a being of radiant light to rescue Ishtar. The being’s name is Asushu-namir, which means “face of light”. The gates of the underworld open to Asushu-namir, who is taken to an audience with the queen of the dead.’
A Unicorn, Robert thought. Like the Man of Swirling Light. What he must become.
‘Such is the radiance of this extraordinary being that when Asushu-namir asks the queen of the underworld for the water of life, she curses and spits but finally cannot refuse, and orders Ishtar to be sprinkled with the life-giving water and removed from her sight. Ishtar is restored to life.
‘At the first gate, her undergarment is returned to her.
‘At the second gate, she puts on again her anklets and bracelets.
‘At the third gate, she puts on again her girdle, studded with birth stones.
‘At the fourth gate, she puts on again the ornaments of her breast.
‘At the fifth gate, she puts on again her necklace.
‘At the sixth gate, she puts on again her earrings.
‘At the seventh gate, she puts on again her crown.
‘Tammuz her lover appears by her side, restored to her. Vegetation enlivens the earth. Fertility returns, and the earthlives.’
The story ended as the train pulled into Canal Street Station. The ride was barely two minutes. He got off, its images still echoing in his mind.
The exit was in the middle of the platform, by a sign saying waiting area in Chinese and English. Robert took the left-hand stairs and crossed Broadway to the north-west corner of the intersection, as instructed. Opposite him rose the off-white National City Bank of New York, built in Egyptian Revival style in 1927, now housing a shoe store. The GPS signal returned with an accuracy of 40 feet, and he headed west. The Quad directed him to make a right turn as soon as he could. The waypoint was just under half a mile away.
He passed shopfronts selling knock-off bags and belts, perfume and clothing, a backrub place, a music equipment and electronics store with huge speakers in the street, a closed hardware store, an industrial plastics store covered in yellow graffiti, and arrived at the corner of Mercer Street.
He made a right. The smell of urine hit him immediately on the heavily spray-painted, run-down first block. Then, as he approached the corner of Grand Street, the Cast-Iron District began and elegant former SoHo warehouses came into view, housing galleries and up-market clothing stores, residential lofts and trendy restaurants.
The Quad buzzed and Terri returned. ‘Once you’re on Mercer just keep going straight till you recover the signal, and listen. There’ll be a stop or two along the way –’
‘That story?’
‘Did you like it? It contains today’s agenda, a little bit at least.’
‘The being of light? That’s me?’
‘It’s all you, Robert, in a sense. We are stripping down your identity, piece by piece. Then, if all goes well, you clothe yourself again. But in a new form. In light. Imagine me taking off my crown now. Can you? And stop when you get to Eve’s Delight.’
It was just north of Grand, a glass shopfront leading to a virtually empty foyer, with the wares discreetly set further back from the street. It was half past two. It was a sex shop, one of the classier ones, run by women. Not his usual kind of haunt, though Kat and he had playfully explored a couple in their earlier days.
Robert stopped and looked up before going in. To the south, the Gothic tower of the Woolworth Building was perfectly framed against the deep blue sky. To the north, framed equally perfectly, he saw the metal spire of the Chrysler Building. Its seven parabolic arcs shimmered in the sunlight.
‘Go in, Robert. There’s something waiting for you here.’
‘This isn’t the waypoint. Is there a cache here?’
‘No, the cache comes later. This is just a present, to help with today’s activities. Ask at the counter.’
He went in, feeling slightly awkward. A friendly woman with multicoloured hair and a nose stud greeted him.
‘I understand there’s something here for me to pick up? My name’s Robert.’
She gave him a relaxed, welcoming smile. ‘Hi, Robert. How are you today? Let me check.’
She looked under the counter. ‘It’s your lucky day. Your wife left this for you.’
She produced an orange-and-black plastic bag with his name clipped to it on a card. ‘She did?’
‘Would you like me to go through it? She asked me just to explain a couple of things.’
‘Er… sure.’
She took on a happy, matter-of-fact, unalluring voice as she removed the items from the bag.
‘You may want to stretchthe cock ring a couple of times before you use it the first time, and lubricate it a little… it goes on before you’re fully erect. There’s a diagram included.’
‘Wow.’
‘If you’re not fully familiar with them, the main thing of course is to take it off if you feel pain or discomfort, and don’t leave it on for too long after sex… there’s some lubricant here… the blindfold is self-explanatory… oooh, I love pin-wheels. They won’t pierce the skin, but they can be very intense, you might want to start slowly with that… I th ink th at’s it?’
Robert stood in a speechless daze, feeling completely awkward. He couldn’t use these things with Terri. He didn’t even know how. Yet she had read him well: part of him was enjoying being teased.
‘Is everything OK, sir?’
‘My wife’s been… busy.’
She smiled. ‘Will there be anything else? No rush, if you’d like to look around.’
‘No, that’s… how much is all that?’
‘It’s taken care of, sir.’
He emerged on to the sidewalk. ‘I’ve just taken off my earrings, Robert. Let’s walk.’
‘That was…’
‘Yes?’
‘I mean, I’m not unfamiliar…’
‘No.’
‘But I hadn’t ever…’
‘Relax, Robert. You and I have some talking to do. If you need some help with it, I can promise you it’s all a necessary part of the Path.’
He passed Pearl River on his right, the giant Chinese goods store that went all the way through to Broadway, like some of the graffiti-sprayed vacant lots. He crossed Broome.
‘Count the lotus flowers, Robert.’
‘Huh?’
‘Learn to look and you’ll see.’
He stopped outside a children’s store called Enchanted Forest and looked around him. ‘Don’t see anything.’
‘Learn to look and you’ll see.’
On the other side of the street there was a design in the black iron columns of an old warehouse. He crossed to look more closely. It was a flower like a lotus, repeated on several of the columns, a flower of black iron. He counted. ‘There are eleven, Terri.’
‘Look at it another way.’
‘Another way? How?’
‘You’ll see. Learn to say yes. Use your eyes.’
‘I am.’
What was she getting at? Eyes. I’s, to say yes. Aye, aye. II.
‘I have it. Roman numerals, I and I.’
‘So what’s the answer?’
‘Two.’
‘Good. Remember that. It fits the sequence. Part of the next password. What did Ishtar take off next?’
‘After the earrings? Her necklace, I think.’
He passed a big warehouse of Indian goods, then a hip clothing store.
‘There goes mine.’
He was at the corner of Mercer and Spring.
‘It was all brothels along here in the nineteenth century,’ Terri said. ‘Keep moving. What did she take off at the fourth gate?’
He could sense water flowing underground. Streams and grass and greenery long gone.
A sign drew his attention, and he photographed it with the Quad: DANGER. HOLLOW SIDEWALK. Indeed. He no longer trusted anything, even the ground under his feet.
‘Umm… breast ornaments.’
‘There goes my bra… You read Neuromancer, Robert?’
‘William Gibson, right? No.’
‘Scene where the hero Case is plugged via computer into the sensations of the street samurai chick so he can follow where she goes and see what she sees… they call it simstim?’
‘Didn’t read it.’
‘She runs a finger around her nipple to give him a taste of how it works… I love that scene. It’s so hot.’
Robert wanted to say he was married. The words wouldn’t come. She knew anyway. And just in one sense, just for a few hours, he realized he didn’t want to be. He was starting to no longer recognize himself.
He passed an antiques and bric-a-brac store, then a lingerie store with mannequins in provocative poses in the window. He looked away, trying to cool himself down. He came to the corner of Prince Street, outside Fanelli’s Bar. The GPS signal kicked back in, accuracy 62 feet, and ‘Arriving Destination’ flashed up on the Quad screen.
‘I’m at the waypoint,’ he said. It was nearly three o’clock.
‘Well done. This was a brothel too. And a speakeasy. It has a hidden room downstairs. Secret entrance via a closet in the bar. Now, you’ll need a clue.’
‘I’m ready.’
‘First, what was the fifth thing she took off?’
‘Her girdle of precious stones. Didn’t know they had them back then.’
‘Think studded belt, maybe belly-chain, garter-belt, that kind of thing. There goes mine.’
‘What’s at the end of this, Terri?’
‘I am, Robert. And you are. Ready for your clue?’
‘Yes.’
‘When I saw where the waypoint was, I couldn’t resist. I’ve had some time to prepare this one. I did it myself. It’s better than the one the Watchman sent me.
‘In a curtained room, in a secret bower
Seek the sacred rose, find the holy flower
She’s on display, and ready to play
And none can resist her, once they have kissed her
To rescue moon’s daughter
Pass the Trial by Water.’
‘I’m your dream creature, Robert. Come find me. There go my anklets and bracelets.’
He started to walk back towards Eve’s Delight, confused. It was too far from the waypoint, though. What did she mean? The secret room at Fanelli’s?
He’d barely begun walking when he stopped again. On display.
‘You’re getting warm.’
The window of the lingerie store.
Curtained room…
He stared at the mannequin on the left. Long black hair, wearing just black panties and thigh-highs, black opera gloves…
‘You’re getting very warm.’
‘You’re inside.’
‘Hot… come in and ask for your wife. But take a good long look at the mannequin in the window, the one who’s standing up on the left. That’s what I’m wearing.’
‘Terri –’
‘Please. Do it now.’
He walked into the store. The décor was silver-grey and pink. A woman in her twenties in a form-fitting pink uniform came to greet him, her breasts pushed up into a welcoming décolletage. Two other women, dressed identically, fussed with the displays in the background. He was the only man in the store.
‘I’m looking for my wife? My name is…’
‘Robert? Hi, how are you? I’m Gemma. She’s expecting you.’
She led him past racks of lace finery to a mirrored space at the back of the store. She gestured to a circular sofa in deep red-orange. There were several changing rooms against the back wall, each with a silver-grey curtain.
‘Please have a seat for a moment, I’ll tell her you’re here.’
She put her head behind the second curtain from the left and spoke in a low voice. Robert heard giggling.
Gemma looked over to him and beckoned. ‘She has something she wants to show you,’ she whispered.
Robert went over to the curtain. Gemma gave his arm a squeeze and walked away. He peeped behind the curtain.
And there was Terri.
‘Hi.’
‘Hi.’
She was wearing a short silver-grey silk gown. Short black hair. Silvered wrap-around sunglasses. Petite. Smiling at him.
She let the gown fall to the ground. She wore just a black thong, black stockings, black opera gloves. Just like the mannequin.
Blood raced from his brain.
‘We meet at last, Robert. Give me your left hand.’
He put it through the curtain.
She took it and made it into a loose fist, separating out just the index finger. She raised the finger to her lips and blew softly on it. She gave a crooked smile.
‘Robert… don’t say anything…’
She parted her lips and, with the tip of her tongue, teased the very end of his finger. She stopped, looked at him, smiled to herself, licked very softly again. He tried to pull his hand away.
‘This is forbidden, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘That’s why it’s so… delicious. Don’t speak.’
She opened her mouth and placed the tip of his finger just inside. She breathed heat but did not close her lips. Removed his finger. Licked along its length with the tip of her tongue, barely touching.
‘You… and I… have some serious… talking to do.’
She made a circle of her lips and closed it around the first joint of his finger. Electricity tore around his body. He leaned into the curtain between them. She placed her left hand on his chest through the curtain.
‘Pleased to see me?’
She began to suck his finger rhythmically, slowly, slightly deeper each time.
‘Stop,’ he said.
She slowed, halted, kept her lips squeezed together on the tip and slowly pulled his finger away, letting a string of saliva form. She stretched it till it broke.
‘I can’t resist this,’ Robert whispered. ‘I’ll fail.’
‘Silly… you’re not supposed to resist it. Now help me buy a corset.’
She pushed his chest through the curtain.
‘Step back, I’m coming out.’
He went back to the sofa, trying to hide his erection. He felt light-headed, his ears ringing. Terri emerged from behind the curtain in her silk robe and called to Gemma. ‘We’d like to try a corset or two. Can you suggest anything?’
She moved in a way that suggested both vulnerability and iron self-possession at once. Gemma brought a flimsy black number and a solider pink creation with black draw strings. Terri held them both against herself for Robert, over her gown.
‘Which do you like better, darling?’
‘The pink.’
‘Would you lace me up in a moment, Gemma?’
Terri walked back into the changing room with the corset and drew the curtain.
‘She’ll look so good in that,’ Gemma said to him. ‘She has such a beautiful neck and shoulders.’
Robert smiled and nodded.
‘She said it’s your anniversary? Congratulations! How many?’
He coughed.
‘First?’
Terri came out from behind the curtain. Gemma moved behind her and placed one hand on Terri’s back as she pulled the laces taut.
‘Tighter,’ Terri said. ‘It feels so sexy to have it tight.’
‘You look great,’ Robert said.
‘Buy it for me? I’ll keep it on.’
She took his arm as they left the store. She wore a sharp executive black jacket and knee-length skirt over the corset and stockings.
‘We’re not going far. Stay close.’
They headed back to Fanelli’s at the corner and crossed Prince Street. Almost immediately, under a great iron clock, Terri steered them through an unmarked black door in a nameless red-brick building.
A lobby like a hipster library greeted them. Books lined a full wall to their right. A few people sat at low tables, pecking at laptops or chatting among themselves. A whitewashed blank wall ahead dazzled Robert. Terri led them past the reception desk, where the young lady smiled and waved at her, directly to the elevators.
When Horace assumed the role of the Watchman, sinking deep into a meditative state, a detached coldness came upon him. As loyal as he was to his charges, he could no longer be their friend. As the Watchman he had to be ready to take unsentimental decisions, even be prepared to sacrifice one of them if necessary. He hoped it would never come to that. He held the details of the plan in his mind and examined every detail. It must not fail. It would not, he fervently prayed, though at every stage there were great risks.
He watched the players in motion, each pursuing their fragments of the puzzle, each acting on the instructions given to them on a need-to-know basis.
Time was running out, but they were all on schedule.
The seven minor keys were arranged along Manhattan in a special array. The maker of the Device had extended them like an antenna, the Watchman now understood, in order to increase the power of his original intended attack.
It had been Adam who had captured the maker’s PDA on Blackout Day, but the Watchman had not trusted Adam with the information it contained. From the very day of the Blackout, it had been clear that souls had been conjoined. Entanglements created. The seed of Adam’s corrosion had been in him since that day. The Watchman had instead entrusted the PDA to Katherine, in deepest secrecy. Urged her to decode the files, thresh the good data from the noise. It had taken a year, but she had cracked them. Mysteries remained. But she had been able to extract the good waypoints, without realizing their full significance.
As soon as she’d accessed them, barely a few days earlier, the PDA had lit up and fired off a signal. The maker of the Ma’rifat’ had clearly booby-trapped the PDA to send it if the waypoints were decoded.
Kat had told the Watchman immediately. And the Watchman had concluded a second Device had now been armed. The clock had started ticking.
The Watchman had seen what the waypoints traced. He saw the full picture. He was able to maintain control of the game and to dole out the parts as required. To Adam. To Katherine. To Terri, in part behind Adam’s back. To Robert. Eachwould have to experience loss and pain in order to play their part. Without a delicate balance, all would be lost.
Once Kat had cracked the codes of the PDA, a summons had quickly reached Adam to attend a meeting with the Iwnw. For a year Adam had been resisting them, and they had not pushed too hard, mysteriously waiting for the moment that now clearly had come. He could no longer refuse. It was then, as soon as the invitation arrived, that Horace had decided what form Robert’s trials would have to take.
The second trial would be sex. Robert would be led to a situation in which he would be subject to the powerful, disruptive forces that dwelled in sexual desire. These were the energies of water – second only in raw power to those of earth. To pass the trial, he would have to tap into those forces and fold them fully into his progress along the Path, neither squandering them nor weakening them. Like many people, he was cut off from their full force.
The Watchman saw the necessary changes in Robert’s relationship with Katherine that would be brought about, and in Terri’s relationship with Adam.
All must suffer, he said to himself. Alas, all must suffer.
Robert would be forced to choose between being true to himself and being true to a sacred vow. They would tear him down by beginning to destroy his marriage.
He would recover a second key, in the form of one circle splitting from another. And he would begin to reassemble a body, his own new body of light.
Adam had asked to meet Robert at a couple of points along the Path. The Watchman had been unsure, not intending to share the specific waypoints with Adam, wary of fully trusting him once everything had begun. Adam had claimed it would help them both: as Robert grew stronger, that strength would help to slow Adam’s own corrosion. And it would help Robert focus his powers by confronting Adam at key points. He’d suggested the first and third trials, maybe the fifth. The Watchman had refused, saying only he would monitor Robert’s progress. If Robert needed to confront Adam, he would send Adam the coordinates in due time.
The Watchman reviewed the remaining five trials, one by one. As Robert climbed the ladder of the different stages of the Path, each energy he tapped into would become less raw and more organized; finer and more capable of intentional direction. And eachone would become more lethal. Without the combined powers of earth and water, he would be killed by the higher energies themselves, if not by the Brotherhood of Iwnw, before he could go any further.
May heaven help us, the Watchman said to himself.
Adam smiled in delight as Robert joined them at dinner on Saturday evening. He boomed: ‘What news?’
‘Georges is giving the Keys a real pounding.’
‘Do you think he’s related to the pianist in the lobby?’
‘Good one.’
‘Does your presence mean we’re safe?’
‘Taking a break. But I’m afraid I have to miss your grand finale. We’re not out of the woods yet. Looks like it’ll veer towards the West Coast and the Panhandle. But it could still switchagain and come straight back at us.’
Everyone else was already finishing their main course. Katherine had kept a seat vacant for him next to her. He grimaced an apology.
‘And so,’ Adam said, without rancour, ‘we must solve the mystery without the services of our good friend Robert. Let us apply ourselves.’
Later that night, Katherine stretched on the bed in Robert’s room.
She recounted the whole experience Adam had put together for them, more in amusement than in puzzlement. He’d locked them in hotel rooms, sent them hunting for clues in ice buckets, had them cracking rudimentary codes. At one point, in one of several rooms rented for the event, he’d pulled a conjuring trick on them, asking them to place all their money, passports, driving licences and photographs of loved ones into a metal bin, and then appearing to set fire to its contents. ‘He almost got himself lynched right there,’ Katherine said.
At the climax, in a breathtaking vaulted suite on the thirteenth floor that had once housed a Prohibition-era casino, Adam had told them the murderer was in the room among them. Then he’d said the victim was too. He’d asked each of them to open a sealed envelope containing the true identity of both the killer and the victim.
Katherine’s envelope had contained a photograph of Katherine. They found they all had photographs of themselves. And, just as they realized this and puzzled protests were starting, Adam had set off some kind of high-intensity flash, like a magnesium flare, and vanished. All that remained was a note inviting them all to stay through Sunday night at his expense, together with a passage translated from a twelfth-century masterpiece of Persian literature, The Conference of the Birds, which he recommended to them. Their experiences had been intended to dramatize and reveal the fabled mystical work in a fresh light, he added.
‘I think he lost a couple of friends, but to be honest I really enjoyed it,’ Katherine said. ‘It was all about the language of the birds, I guess.’
‘I’ve no idea what that means.’
‘That’s OK. Let’s not talk any more about Adam.’
Now she spoke from the depth of her memories, her eyes still on the invisible, secret world she had left behind, the one of which she could never fully speak.
She told him about the man she had lost.
‘He was as brave as a lion, in his own way. Went in to spy for us. To betray his country for the greater good of the world. He was one of the people who actually think that way.’
Robert assumed it had involved nuclear secrets of some kind.
‘He was already being squeezed by his own intelligence people, by the local Mukhabarat. He didn’t care for them. They put pressure on him through his family. It was tawdry and stupid – he said they weren’t even asking him sensible questions. So he came to us. And I made myself the greater good of the world. That’s what I was to him. For him there was no world without me, and its future happiness was whatever made me happy.’
‘You were his… controller? You ran him?’
‘He ran himself. But, yes, in the organigram of who was to blame, I was the one. I didn’t discover him. Finders don’t usually get to be keepers. He was actually a walk-in. I wish to betray my country, sooner rather than later, and I am also in a great hurry to fall in love. But he was mine to exploit, and I was good at it.’
‘You shouldn’t despise yourself.’
‘I wonder, if it hadn’t been me, whether anyone would have done. For him, I mean.’
‘To the extent that they were male with bad breath and a hairy back, I doubt it.’
‘Any woman, then.’
‘Were there that many of you? In your line of work?’
‘Enough.’
‘But he was given to you.’
‘Yes.’
‘And there are strictures, I assume, about falling in love with those one is controlling. Running.’
‘Yes. Verboten. Whereas vice versa may prove useful.’
‘Was it your head for maths he loved?’
‘The fact that I could discuss the science at a professional level was helpful. You know how well trained we were. And it was platonic.’
‘Willingly so?’
‘No, of course not. He wanted to consummate, and I didn’t let him.’
‘But you didn’t crush his hopes.’
‘Not once I saw which way it was going. That it would serve as a tool. And then one day…’
‘Yes?’
‘He said something. It won’t sound shattering or epic or anything. It was silly, really.’
‘What?’
‘He said he was always afraid. Every day, all night, all the time. Except when he saw me, and we talked about mathematics. He said it stilled his mind.’
Robert looked at her quizzically.
‘And something broke for me. I realized I couldn’t treat him like that. That doing so made me part of the problem. Definitively, resolutely, not the greater good of the world. Quite the contrary.’
‘And you told your superiors and were pulled off the case and never saw him again.’
‘No.’
‘I imagine they call that being unprofessional?’
‘They have lots of words, if they find out about it.’
‘But they didn’t.’
‘They didn’t. And I sent him in because if I didn’t, we wouldn’t be saving the world. There was no way not to send him. He could love me only if that’s what we were doing. And somewhere along the line I started to believe.’
‘Can I ask where this was?’
‘Does it matter? His name was Tariq. He was giving such a lot. Everything. I felt I had to give him something in return. Something of value to him, something commensurate.’ She sighed. ‘I gave him something I shouldn’t have.’
‘What?’
She frowned. ‘We’d talked a lot about the great Arabic thinkers. The philosophers, the scientists, the alchemists. He was intensely proud of his lineage, as he called it.’
‘Yes.’
‘You remember the Newton document that Adam was the guardian of?’
‘I do.’
‘It quoted several of the great Muslim scholars. On the nature and manufacture of the great secret. On the ways to combine glass and metals. I gave him a copy.’
‘Did Adam know?’
‘No. I trusted Tariq. And the formula wasn’t complete. But it’s haunted me ever since.’
‘What did he do with it?’
‘He called it just a beautiful artefact, and a reminder of lost knowledge. Then he gave it back to me. Trust for trust. For several years we had good material. The best. No one else had it. Not the Americans. No one. Grandma would have been proud of me.’
‘And then?’
‘And then he wanted to come out.’
‘Not so keen on saving the world after all?’
‘You’ve no idea of the strain he was under. I was told to keep him in-country.’
‘He wouldn’t be muchuse once he’d been let out, I imagine.’
‘He was priceless. We owed him. But we pushed harder. Eventually it was agreed he could come out, but only if we squeezed every last drop of intelligence we could from him first. So we did. And we said we’d arrange something for his family. His father. Get him out of the hands of the Mukhabarat.’
‘Around when is this, now?’
‘1997, late summer. So I arranged his extraction.’
‘Just you?’
‘A team of us. I was in charge.’
He sat still, waiting for her to go on.
‘We were all set. Van, secret compartment, funny passports. He’d confirmed he was coming. Yellow chalk mark the previous day, pre-set location. It was a grey morning. Overcast.’
‘Cold?’
‘Yes. And… he never came. He just… wasn’t there.’
‘You waited.’
‘Till it was dangerous. Beyond dangerous. We all agreed to pushit. But we couldn’t stay for ever.’
‘He was arrested?’
‘Never knew. Probably, after a fashion. They would have hurt him. For days. Then I assume he died. I never heard. It makes it harder to grieve, in some ways, but in other ways I’d rather not know. There’s always the slim hope that he survived.’
‘I’m so sorry.’
‘And so I got myself out of the service.’
‘I’m glad.’
‘There was one other thing.’
‘It died. I hadn’t truly realized I had it, until it went away.’
He tried to react kindly, without abandoning his scepticism. ‘Kat, I always had the idea it was empathy, or being highly aware of body language, or something similar. Intuition, or tapping the unconscious. You remember how you used to talk, at university.’
‘That’s what I said, I know. But it was much more than that. When I was a girl, I thought everyone could do what I did. But no one else heard what I heard. It was like music, like wonderful harmonies. It was as if everything resonated, and I could attune myself to people and things, and learn from them. I’d talk to people, or even just touch them, and words would form in my mind.’
‘You heard voices?’
She sighed. ‘No, not voices. Or maybe inner voices. But the words that came would be exactly what people most needed to hear, or wanted to say. I’d find my lips forming the words even before we’d spoken. Words like lonely, or vulnerable, or…’ She stopped and smiled.
‘Randy?’
‘Quite often, Mr Reckliss.’
‘And you lost it all?’
‘I lost some of it, the night of the fire.’
‘Let’s not talk about that.’
She looked at him in amusement. ‘You’re still terrified of that night. After all these years.’
‘It’s dead. It’s in the past. Go on.’
‘Then when I lost Tariq, it turned off completely.’
‘Just like that?’
‘Like creeping cotton wool. Over several days.’
‘I’m not sure I want it back. It was very useful, when I was doing that work. Now I associate it with loss. With betrayal. I’ve gone as far as I ever want to go down the danger road. I’m finished with it. The older I get, the more I realize I need solidity. A man who’ll always be there. A rock. Someone like you.’
Robert kissed her.
‘Stay with me.’
‘I think I will.’
Robert and Terri rode up to the sixth floor.
The hotel-room doors were of heavy solid grey metal, like brushed steel. A little green magnetic sticker on their door said Yes, please.
In the room, they stood facing each other. Terri filled the room with her presence. She was sexual gravity.
‘Robert. Time to talk. You think I’m going to have sex with you now?’
‘I was hoping you would want to. And I was hoping you wouldn’t want to.’
‘Understandable. You are married, after all.’
‘I haven’t been touched in six months. I could melt for a woman’s flesh on mine. But…’
‘I know.’
‘Who are you?’
‘I am your needs. From the Robert who is still a gauche horny fifteen-year-old, all the way through to the Robert who is a gauche, horny 42-year-old. All the Roberts are OK. All the Roberts who want to fuck me are good. There’s no need to feel bad about any of them. And all the Roberts who feel guilty about wanting to fuck me are OK too. You’re a good man.’
She held her head with such self-possession. Yet she looked entirely vulnerable. He marvelled at her.
‘Robert, these next few hours are a sealed-off time and place. It’s all about us. It’s sacred, and it’s necessary, and no one will ever know. I need you to do some things for me, and to me… And you need me to do some things for you, and to you. It will make you feel good. It will make us bothwell. It will strip you of your fear and fill it with well-being. It will give you something you’ve never had, something everyone needs, that everyone should have.’
‘What is that?’
She kept her tone light, almost playful. ‘Everyone is unique. No one responds in the same way, no one has the same psycho-sexual needs. But we all need the same outcome. It’s just a question of finding the right path for eachperson to get there.’
‘What is that place?’
‘It can’t be talked about. It can only be experienced. You’re afraid of the God in the sex. You’re afraid of what you’ll experience if you fully lose control, or fully take control. It scares you to be fully in the moment. Sex is like a spell or a charm, but you’ve never let it take you to the end of the line. You always pop back out and start observing yourself. If you fear the God in anything, it’s because you fear the God in yourself. You’ve locked something away so deeply behind a veil of fear that you can’t let it out any more, and it’s killing you. And we need to free it. Otherwise you’re no use to anyone. And certainly no use to me.’
He should leave, he knew. But he also knew he wasn’t going to.
‘Sex is sex,’ he said. ‘It’s wonderful, but at the end of the day it’s just a physical spasm.’
He remembered the night of the fire. Sex with Katherine. His first time, though he hadn’t told her. And ever since that night, the association of sex with destruction, with harming others, with starting the fire… ever since then, the disconnection from his own body as he let it pursue its own rhythms, the delightful but empty physical release…
‘It’s never too late to learn something new, Robert.’
‘Terri. Look me in the eyes.’
‘You’ve worked out my secret?’
He saw himself reflected, distorted, in the silvered curves of her sunglasses. He hadn’t before, but now he did.
‘You’re blind.’
‘I am. And yet I see.’
‘How? What happened?’
‘I got hurt on the day of the Blackout. A lot of things went down that day.’
‘Tell me.’
‘I will. But we have something more pressing to take care of first.’
She slowly unbuttoned her jacket, lingering over each button, and let it drop from her fingertip to the floor. The corset emphasized the grace of her neck, the full curve of her breasts.
‘Terri, you’re amazing.’
‘You have no idea. I love this hotel. Feel the sheets. To be honest, the thread-count alone is going to make me come at least once.’ She unzipped her skirt and let it fall, then stepped daintily out of it. ‘Make love to me, Robert.’
A heartbeat rocked his body so hard he thought he’d fall. He was dizzy, his ears ringing, heat and heavy blood flushing through his body. Her sexual magnetism gripped him, pulling him towards her smiling lips, her mesmerizing perfume. The sight and smell of her body ignited purples and violets in his eyes, birdsong in his memory, aching lust in every fibre of his being.
He stepped forward and lifted her clear off the ground, pushing her up against the wall as she wrapped her legs tightly around his waist. She moaned, arms around his neck, one hand pulling his hair, the stiff ribs of the corset pressing against his chest as he kissed her mouth, her face, her neck.
He wheeled around and took two steps towards the bed before flinging them both down on it, landing with his elbows either side of her, then kneeling up to unbuckle his belt. He undid his shirt, then stopped for a moment, breathing hard, as she held up an open palm to him.
‘Take everything off,’ she said. ‘I’ll be here.’
She slipped off her thong and leaned back, one hand behind her head and the other flitting over her body, over the stockings and black lace, to her neck, to her thighs. When he was naked, he leaped straight back on to her, beside himself, not knowing himself, thrusting deeply, thrilling to her cry of surprise and pleasure, lost in his own body and its sheer pounding weight as she pulled him into her.
He was lost to himself, lost to the world, pushing and pushing. Time ceased to pass. Only when he had felt her peak twice, and was preparing to let go, did he notice her hands snaking up his back, from his tailbone to his shoulder blades and the base of his skull. He heard her intoning words softly, none he understood, as she breathed deeply under him, drawing him in, pulling him down.
She cooed into his ear: ‘Slow down now, lover. Stop for a moment. Time to show you something new.’
She held him tight inside her, running her hands down again to the base of his spine, whispering calming words. He breathed deeply, staring down at her taut cheekbones, smiling lips, pale transparent skin.
‘Most people don’t understand,’ she said, ‘that orgasm is a full-body experience, and a full-mind experience, a full-soul experience, that has very little to do with ejaculation in the man. I won’t let you ejaculate. If I do, you’ll disperse all the energy we’ve been building up, and are going to build up in the next few hours. But I’ll show you something better.’
He felt a shuddering heat ignite at the base of his spine, licking like flame along his back and out to the tips of his fingers and toes. She was holding her hands just over his tailbone, then weaving her fingers up and down above his back. His whole body began to rock as his mind filled with torrents of violet light. A deep growl began in the depths of his chest. And then he was consumed in a roaring, lung-emptying, body-racking howl of pleasure that lasted till he no longer knew who or where he was.
When he recovered consciousness, he was still inside her, as erect as ever.
‘Good boy,’ she whispered. ‘Good boy.’
They made love for hours.
Every square millimetre, every tendon and joint and curve. Recounting and honouring and full attention given, full and loving care given and received. Naming and knowing each corner, each pore, each lash, each taste, each limb. Interconnecting of all. Knowing of all. Endless and without time. The tracing of the body of the lover is the tracing of the pattern of the city, and the honouring of each part of the body is the rebuilding of the mystical body, the building and remembering of the body of light.
Eventually they rested, her head nestled on his chest. He reached to the bedside table for a bottle of water from the ice bucket. Her silver shades and necklace lay next to it, along with his wedding ring. Her eyes were a wild, piercing green. He watched her in the mirror.
‘You can’t see me.’
‘I can feel you. That’s all I need.’
‘You have great imagination.’
‘No, I have great perversity. It’s far more fun.’
‘I’ve never felt so alive.’
‘We’re not done yet, baby.’
‘I’ve no idea what time it is.’
‘That’s a good thing, Robert. Recover your power… with some sex in the shower.’
‘In a moment. Not quite yet.’
‘They have great showers here. They have jets of water that fire all the way along your spine. Or if you turn round… they just seem to hit all your erogenous zones at once.’
He kissed her head. ‘So I think I’ve worked out the location of cache number two.’
‘It’s you. Your body.’
‘Bravo.’
‘The cached object is on your person.’
‘It is. Or it was.’
‘Your necklace? The one that was nestling so happily between your breasts until I took it off?’
‘The same.’
‘If you know where the caches are and what’s in them, why do you need me to go and empty them?’
‘I don’t know where the rest are. But since this trial involved meeting you myself, I had to know where the waypoint was. And the Watchman sent me the original clue early enough for me to work out where the cache was. It was hidden on the roof of this hotel, actually. I knew this would work better if I could wear the key myself. So I took it and strung it on a chain.’
‘Who writes the clues? The ditties?’
‘I don’t know. But, as for the rest of the keys, you need to collect them all. It’s because of what you become each time you find one.’
‘What do I become?’
‘More powerful. More beautiful.’
‘How so?’
‘More able to help Adam. To help all of us.’
‘Can I do it? Can anyone do it?’
‘You’ve made a good start. Don’t go thinking it’s all going to be like this, though. You need to build sexual energy on top of the fighting energy, the killing force, from yesterday. Then tomorrow is a different challenge. You won’t survive tomorrow without today.’
He was silent for a moment. His body was glowing with relaxed heat, with the memory of her touch. Yet death was stalking them, somehow.
‘I understand now the second line of a letter I received. When I was eighteen. Give to receive. That’s just good advice on dealing with others, I guess, but good love advice too. Good sex advice. Then seed is not sensation. That’s what you showed me. I thought that was just a thing yogis did.’
‘There’s a core wisdom behind lots of practices and beliefs that might seem different,’ Terri said. ‘You are on the Path of that wisdom.’
He reached over and picked up the necklace. The pendant was made of a light metal and was a reddish gold, like the Malice Box.
‘I recognize this shape,’ he said. ‘What’s it called, this fish shape?’
‘Vesica piscis.’
‘Is this the object? I need to take it.’
‘Take it. Guard it. Keep it safe.’
‘What kind of keys are these, Terri?’
‘To hell. If they are misused.’
‘To hell. So how does this all work? Who’s behind this impending attack? Horace said it was some kind of soul bomb, not just a truck of ammonium nitrate. Tell me.’
‘All I know is this. Adam was terrified about going to see the people he went to see on Wednesday. They are the ultimate bad guys in this. They need people to work through. They wait and wait, and then, when they see a chance, they attach themselves to someone in psycho-spiritual distress and slowly twist them to their ends. This Device, this Ma’rifat’, is built using very rare materials, impossible to find, and using very old knowledge, the kind of knowledge you find on the Path. It resonates to people’s souls. Amplifies what it finds there. There’s a reason that the true Path is not widely advertised. It’s too dangerous. It was built by someone whose pain and suffering attracted the Iwnw, and now it serves their purpose.’
‘What is their purpose?’
‘Well, the last time they got any traction in the world was in Bosnia. And they were able to influence some key Nazis in World War Two. People around Heinrich Himmler. They ride that kind of wave. Adam’s grandfather fought them, back then.’
‘The SS? The Nazis?’
‘These people. Adam called them the Brotherhood of Iwnw.’
He stared at the ceiling. ‘I was nearly killed yesterday for the bullet casing. Was that them?’
‘I told you, you were protected.’
‘It damn well didn’t feel like it.’
‘If you hadn’t been, you would have been killed.’
‘I take it someone’s going to want to kill me for this one too?’
‘It’s already harder to kill you. You’re already stronger. Let’s hope not.’
‘Are you in danger too?’
‘I can look after myself. But there is danger for all of us. And somehow, it even involves your wife. I don’t know how.’
He spoke sharply. ‘Why Katherine?’
‘Something to do with the Blackout. That’s all I understand. Everything’s to do with the Blackout.’
‘That’s the day our baby was conceived.’
‘I know. Something changed that day, for all of us. Adam and I have only been truly together since that day. Since… I can’t tell you some of this.’
‘I want to know everything.’
‘I’d had very deep intuition all my life, it was normal to me. But after that day my abilities increased – tenfold, more. It was as though I’d been kicked, slam. As though I’d expanded within myself, somehow, as though my inner body, the one I imagined being made of light, suddenly amped up and blew through my skin. It blew my eyes to hell, I don’t know how to describe it… Suddenly I couldn’t see, but I could start fires in people’s minds. Suddenly I could feel whatever it was that people were yearning for in their lives, what buttons to press. It wasn’t all good, believe me. At all. I could make things happen, I could just know things about people, I could do things I’d only dreamed about… read people to their core… read their needs…’
‘How well can you read me? Stupid question?’
‘I can read you as though you were made of glass, my dear.’
‘Can you turn it off?’
‘I have to. I have to shield myself from it. The acuity of perception is too great. I’d die. At first it made me live way too much for other people. But I’ve found my centre now. When it’s worth while, I can turn it full on. You, Robert. You’re worth while. That’s why I can be your dream creature. I can see what you need. And I can give it to you.’
‘What do I need next?’
‘Actually let’s talk about what I need next.’
‘And what’s that?’
She handed him the cock ring. ‘Take a wild guess. This will help.’
They made love again, ate, showered, made love, each exploration melding into the next. They were drunk on eachother, on pleasure. Terri seemed to live one perpetual orgasm. She gave him two more all-consuming, full-body climaxes that left him gasping, shattered, yet bursting with raw energy.
As she floated between peaks at one point, nearing another, she handed him the nerve wheel. It was a rounded metal device with dull spikes that looked like spurs for a horse.
‘Very, very gently… very… run this over my skin,’ she said. ‘I can only take it when I’m this turned on.’
She sighed and closed her eyes as he did so. She trembled at the sensations, cooing and moaning, ‘Softly… softly…’
She reached a slow and intense peak, shaking against him, then took the wheel from his hand. After a few moments of deep breathing, she took his hand.
‘The path you are on is called the Path of Seth. It is based on the idea of dismembering the subject – that’s you – and building him up again. In a moment we’re going to do a kind of ritual around that. Something to help you on your way.’
It was getting dark outside. He barely recognized himself.
‘Tell me more about Terri. Where are you from?’
‘New York. Brooklyn. The rough part.’
‘So what is identity management? You’re a computer whiz?’
‘Oh, Robert. Now you sound like an old man. Please.’
‘What?’
‘Computer whiz? I have lots of names, lots of identities. This one is all for you. And yes, I know computers. I put myself through college.’
‘Is Terri your real name?’
‘No.’
‘Do you have anything as mundane as a job?’
‘No. With gifts like mine, money comes to you.’
‘Do you really make videos?’
‘Maybe. Nothing you’ve ever heard of, if I do.’
‘And you seek God.’
‘If I had to choose a religion, I’d say I’m a Sufi. But all labels are meaningless: the question is what’s in your heart. I am what I do. If I said I was a Buddhist, would it make a difference? A Wiccan? What’s in my heart?’
‘What about the vesica piscis?’
‘Get it. Look at it.’
He took it from the bedside table.
‘Second rung of the ladder. It’s the shape you get when two cells divide. It’s creation. A circle with a point in the centre, then another circle, each with its edge going through the centre of the other. It makes a fish shape. It makes a pointed oval shape. Church entrances are shaped like it. And vulvas. Not a coincidence.’
‘I want this to last for ever.’
‘It will.’
‘But in this world, I’ll have to go home at some point.’
‘Everything in its time. We’re not done.’
‘We’re not?’
‘Lie back.’
She handed him the blindfold.
‘What kind of ritual is this?’
‘Trust me.’
She sat up and locked her eyes on his. Mesmerizing emerald depths drew him in, drew him up. She leaned down to kiss him. He closed his eyes and lost himself in the kiss. He felt her slip the blindfold over his eyes.
She whispered some words, nothing he could understand. Musical, resonant words. Then he felt the nerve wheel moving slowly across his skin, marking where his arms joined his torso, then his legs, then along his sternum to his chin. It was intense, but neither painful nor sexual. She drew it along each side of his neck, then put it to one side.
The light in the room changed. The quality of the black grew lighter. She pulled off the blindfold and was kissing his still lowered eyelids. One. The other. Then both together. Then his forehead. He cracked his eyelids open and saw golden-yellow light flooding the room.
Terri was smiling at him. There were two of her. He saw an identical twin of her splitting from her body and moving to the right. A twin of light. They both glowed golden-yellow. Then they both leaned forward and kissed him on each side of his neck. Kissed down along his chest. Two tongues traced interlocking patterns down his breastbone, along his stomach.
They both looked up at him and spoke in unison. ‘We’re just getting started.’
‘How the hell do you do that?’ he hissed. ‘Jesus God.’
They kissed all the lines Terri had drawn with the wheel, as though symbolically stitching him back together. This time he trembled with pleasure.
‘When you build up enough power, enough energy of the right kind,’ they said, still speaking in unison, ‘you can project a body of light outside yourself. Like this.’
They kissed him everywhere, sharing, alternating. Then one lay down against him and slowly began to fade, seeming to melt into his flesh, while the other solidified slowly back into Terri’s pale skin.
‘Rest now,’ she said. ‘I’ve made a gift of my energy to you. May it strengthen you.’
He slept for a while, a smile deep in his body. The whole world was singing in his skin, and skin was all he and the whole world were made of.
Several scented candles in small glass pots burned all around the room in the half-light. She got dressed.
‘I’m going to leave you to pull yourself together now,’ she whispered in his ear. ‘This was wonderful. You were wonderful. The clock is stopped for tonight. There is no time for us right now. But tomorrow it will run even faster. Be ready.’
‘Terri –’
‘Be quiet.’
Robert dozed again, this time for almost two hours, before eventually getting up and running a bath.
He had been lying in the water for a few minutes, Terri’s necklace wrapped around his fingers as he gazed at the design, one vesica piscis within another, when he heard the door open.
‘Terri?’
No reply.
He sat up, ready to climb out of the water.
He shouted: ‘Hello?’
A figure appeared in the bathroom doorway, holding up a bedsheet between them. He vaguely saw what he thought was a woman’s silhouette behind the sheet before it flew at him, covering his face and chest. A hand came behind it, forcing his head under the water, forcing the wet sheet over his nose and mouth.
Robert fought to remain calm, jamming his hands up where it seemed his attacker’s head would be, trying to hold his breath. He missed, flailing against wet cloth. A gloved fist punched him in the solar plexus, and he shouted involuntarily, inhaling water. The linen tightened around his face. Now panic kicked in. He thought he heard a woman’s voice as the blood roared in his ears, and he lashed and kicked upwards. He felt a hand grabbing for the necklace in his closed fist. Glass shattered as he kicked candles over.
Darkness started to rim his vision. He was at the bottom of a deep, dark well, the stones wet and slippery to the touch, clawing with his fingers to pull himself up… He felt the water heating up as he struggled. It began to scald him. Through the sheet over his face, he suddenly saw his own arms and hands, flailing upwards, outlined in a grey-blue viscous light. The light was hot, fluid but dense, dripping from his fingers. Burning hot. With his eyes closed he could see it even more clearly. He reached upwards and grabbed the arms of his attacker. She screamed. He felt the crackle of shrivelling flesh as his hands burned into her skin.
Then the figure was gone, the bedsheet suddenly limp and knotted around him. The heat had gone out of his body as suddenly as it had come. He heaved his torso over the edge of the bath, coughing up water, gasping for breath. Steam rose from the bathtub. The necklace was still wrapped around his fingers. The door slammed.
Robert pulled himself out of the bath and rolled on to the bathroom floor. It’s real, he said to himself, over and over. It’s real. Dear God, it’s all real. Part of him had still not quite believed that the spiritual threats Horace and Adam and Terri had spoken of were about real physical violence in the real world. He’d told himself the fight on the subway could have been a mugger, the whole thing could somehow still have been a macabre game that was spinning out of control.
Now he knew for certain: there were people who were trying to kill him, and he had the power and strength to fight back.
When Robert got home, no one was there. A note in the kitchen said Katherine had gone to visit her friend Claire in the West Village. She’d be back late again.
He felt relief. He couldn’t lie to Katherine. It wasn’t in his nature. Yet he dreaded confessing to her what he had done. It seemed to him he still smelled of Terri, smelled of sex.
It was after ten at night. He had the necklace safely in his grasp. But he didn’t have his wedding ring. When he’d gone to pick it up from the bedside table, it hadn’t been there. He’d uprooted everything. Nowhere to be found. He’d tried to reach Terri on the Quad. Number blocked.
He changed clothes, put his things in the washing machine, ran it. Showered. Called Katherine to say he was going to bed soon. Left her a message again. Called Claire’s landline and learned Katherine was fine and had just left.
He sat alone and stared into his returning fear.
When attacked, he’d had no qualms about fighting back. He’d protected the keys. He felt good about that. And he was becoming more powerful. He felt more alive. But at what cost? He’d done a thing he’d sworn never to do, broken a vow he’d sworn never to break. There would be consequences, and he wouldn’t avoid them. Yet it had felt so necessary, so right, to make love to Terri. He might not even have survived without the power she had given him. But it was going to happen again. Would he be as strong next time? He felt his stomach knot. It was real. He had no choice but to go on.
He looked for a message from Terri. She had sent him another audio file. Nothing else. It was called ‘Two Knights’. It was password-protected. He tried various variations of vesica piscis. Then he remembered the black iron flowers. Two was part of the sequence, she’d said. Part of the password.
It opened to Vesica2. It was a haunting piece of operatic music for two male voices. He listened again and again. They were singing in German. Eventually he identified it through internet searches. It was from The Magic Flute. He found several translations, some freer than others. The part she had sent him was incomplete. It said, more or less:
Whoever walks this path of pain will become purified
Through fire, water, air and earth.
If he can overcome the fear of death
Then he takes flight for heaven…
He fired up the Quad and posted a short note.
Today was the Trial by Water. Find God in the sea of sex. I have never felt so fully known, so fully electrified, so fully comfortable with another human being. Having her utterly in my power. Being utterly in her power.
But my sexual desire cannot be for Terri. It has to be for Katherine. I have to fold it back towards her.
A response came within a few minutes, but not from TerriC1111.
You have done well, Robert. You have passed the second trial.
The Watchman
I do not address you with the splendour and flourishes of my native tongue, for I am well versed in American ways and know that you will find too much ‘God is greatest’ and ‘praise be to Allah’ discomfiting.
I was killed by my own creation on August 14, 2003.
Can you believe a man can be killed by his sins? For this is how I died, sparking the great discharge of energy that plunged the north-eastern United States into darkness on that day.
I failed in my mission, for the detonation was unintended. I came under attack at the key moment of arming the Device, and I was not sufficiently pure in my heart, mind and soul to respond safely. Although the effect was great, the power released was only a fraction of its potential.
Know simply this: there is another Ma’rifat’. There were two Devices. When the second is detonated, it will slice away that which is impurest in the impurest of cities in the impurest of nations: it will destroy Manhattan, the clitoris of the great whore, because in Manhattan it will find the richest fuel for its detonation, because Manhattan is so riddled with greed, and lust, and envy, and pride that the chain reaction, once begun, will erupt like 10,000 suns. An apocalypse of souls.
You may think what I have to say is gibberish. Let us explore that term. For what is ‘gibberish’ to you, what sounds like the jabbering of a madman, may simply show your prejudice and ignorance. Do you know where this word comes from? And ‘alchemy’, ‘algebra’, ‘algorithm’. ‘Alcohol’?
Let us look at some of these words.
For, while some will say ‘gibberish’ merely imitates the sound of nonsensical talk, others will tell you of Jabir ibn Hayyan, known to you in the West as Geber, the greatest Muslim alchemist of all, also a geometer, a mathematician, all knowledge being one to the wise; for his language and concepts were so subtle, and his encoding of the great secrets so effective, that none but the finest minds could pierce the ‘gibberish’ of his writings to discover the gold beneath.
Or perhaps we should take ‘algebra’ – once also used in English to mean bone-setting, did you know that? – which derives from al-jabr, Arabic for bringing broken parts back together, used by the ninth-century mathematician Abu Ja’far Muhammad ibn Musa Al-Khwarizmi of Baghdad as the title of his Kitab Al-Jabr w’al-Muqabala, or Rules of Reintegration and Reduction, his great treatise on equations.
Or ‘algorithm’, which simply mangles the name of the same man, Al-Khwarizmi, who also gave you our Arabic numerals.
Or ‘alchemy’ itself, from Al-Kimiya, from Khem, an ancient name for Egypt, the black land, land of the black earth. There is more. Let us not speak of ‘alcohol’, for example! But I do not wish to tire you.
Looking backwards in time, the Muslim stands between the modern world and the ancient wisdoms of Egypt and Greece; we are the door through which your world passed; we are the filter of that knowledge, and the saviours of it. Without us, there would have been no you.