Robert awoke early, feeling like a stranger in his own house. His body was singing. His whole being was singing. But he could not imagine being anywhere else. Katherine. The memory of Moss. Their life together.
Surely he smelled still of Terri. He could taste her, smell her, feel her on his body. He felt complete. Fully alive. He had never felt so physically jubilant, never felt his body resonate so fully with joy. In his skull. In his mind. In the tips of his fingers. In his heart, for God’s sake. From the sex. From fighting and surviving the second attack.
He looked in on the room that would have been Moss’s. Suddenly tears burst from his eyes, and he stood crying silently for the loss of his baby boy, shoulders shaking.
He left without waking Katherine, leaving her a note. He couldn’t face her. Told her he’d been summoned urgently by Horace. Another lie, though he felt oddly, coldly detached from it.
In Manhattan, Robert left the Port Authority bus station and fired up the Quad on 8th Avenue. A text message was waiting for him from Terri giving the new waypoint: X62. It was a couple of miles south-east, at a corner of what looked like Tompkins Square Park. The message had said eleven o’clock, and it was barely ten. He decided to walk east along 42nd Street to the F train at Bryant Park and take the subway to Delancey.
It was a humid, brilliantly sunny day. A fever was building in the city. The Republicans were coming. There had been armed National Guards in camouflage uniform around the Lincoln Tunnel. The Fujifilm blimp was overhead but now painted with NYPD markings. Whenever he looked up, it was there, an unblinking eye in the sky. Groups of police cars sped by, making sudden rushes from one part of Manhattan to another. A motorcade of five black vehicles, windows tinted, forced its way through an intersection in the oncoming traffic lane, lights flashing. Already there were police everywhere. Even the skyline was weaponized. He talked to a couple of cops at Times Square.
‘Ready for the Republicans?’
‘Ready for anything.’
‘Protesters?’
‘Anything. You’re in the safest place in the world right now. See all those rooftops? There’re sharpshooters on most all of them.’
Many New Yorkers were away on vacation. Few Republicans and protesters had arrived yet. But something momentous was coming, for good or evil. Regular rules were eroding; space was opening up for extraordinary things to happen.
He was burning to see Terri. He jogged up the subway stairs at Delancey and pulled out the Quad. As soon as he had a fix on the waypoint – just over half a mile north – he ran along Essex Street.
There was a giant clock face on the side of an apartment building’s water tower as he approached Houston. All the numbers were screwed up: 12, 4, 9, 6… He shook his head and looked again. They were still screwed up.
As he came to the south-west corner of Tompkins Square Park, ‘Arriving Destination’ flashed up on the Quad screen. He looked about. No sign of her. Five minutes to eleven. He examined the immediate area, looking for anything meaningful.
Where was she? What was she doing to him?
He walked into the park. Five or six guys, down at heel, were congregated around the stone chess tables. One was speaking Spanish. No one was playing. He sat in one of the green slatted chairs at a chessboard and waited.
Every inch of his body was smiling at him. Every second of pleasure was recorded in the memory of his skin. The slightest friction of his shirt against his chest conjured her hair and fingertips brushing over him, her breath on him, her eyes on him, her heat, her sugar-wet, her salt-wet, her honey-wet.
He checked the Quad: ‘Ready to navigate, accuracy 7 5 feet.’
Someone settled into the seat behind him, their back to him.
‘Don’t turn round, Robert,’ a man’s voice said. ‘It’s time for us to talk.’
‘Adam?’
‘Just don’t turn round.’
‘What the hell?’
‘This is a place of great holiness and great loss, you know? Terrible sadness. Lots of homeless people, lots of desperation, lots of lost faith, lost hope. Then there’s some joy too. Dancing and singing. If you know where to look.’
‘Where’s Terri?’
‘We’ll get to her in a few minutes, don’t fret.’
‘Are you safe?’
‘No, old friend, I’m not. Not at all safe.’
‘What’s going on?’
‘You’re saving me, I think. I hope you are. Are you?’
No words came. Robert made to twist round in his seat. Adam’s voice was sharp: ‘Don’t. For Christ’s sake, don’t.’
‘I don’t know what’s going on, Adam.’
‘Just make like you’re enjoying the sun, or something. Talk softly. In a moment you’ll go for a walk. For now, relax a little and listen.’
Robert clenched his jaw.
‘You asked if I’m in danger. Yes, I am. So are you, so are we all. You need to come further into the game if you are to come out on the other side. There is no way out but in.’
‘I – ’
‘Please. This scavenger hunt we are all involved in has, I’m afraid, an evil core to it. I’m being compelled to take part, I have no choice in the matter. I’m in it, there’s no getting around the fact.’
‘In over your head?’
He heard a sardonic laugh. ‘In so far over my head I can’t even see the sunlight any more. Just the occasional glimmer. When I do see it, it’s so beautiful it would break your heart.’
‘No. There’s no hiding from it.’
‘I want to help you.’
‘Thank you. You’ve always been an extraordinary man, Robert, in part by being so ordinary. You’re kind, you’re direct, you’re honest – all with the possible exception of yesterday, admittedly, a necessary interlude – and an amazing thing about you is that you can’t see your own power. You don’t know what you are. The night of the fire, when you saved my life and Katherine’s, our lives were… entangled. Whether we like it or not. Are you familiar with the concept?’
‘Tell me.’
‘Imagine identical twin sisters. They both have an amazing trick. They both only ever wear black or white, but they never wear the same colour at the same time. And they never make up their minds which they are wearing until someone looks at one of them. As soon as a gaze falls upon one of them, her clothes take on a specific colour. Say white.’
‘I like your metaphor. What are their names?’
‘They’re both called Phoebe. But here’s the thing. They have to add up to zero. They have to add up to grey. As soon as Phoebe One’s clothes turn white, Phoebe Two’s clothes turn black, instantaneously. No matter how far apart they are in time and space. Information can’t travel faster than the speed of light, yet somehow it happens, when there’s no way for it to happen. Entanglement is what the scientists call it.’
‘That’s impossible. I’ve heard of this, now that you describe it. It’s what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance”. He didn’t believe in it, didn’t like it, didn’t want it. I’m with Einstein, I have to say. God doesn’t play dice, as he said. It’s simply a flaw in our understanding.’
‘Well, it’s been done in the laboratory with photons. The first time was in Paris, nearly thirty years ago. Not with colour but with something they call spin. It’s been repeated many times since. It exists as a physical phenomenon. But I’m not talking about physical phenomena or black and white dresses in our case. I’m talking about souls, Robert. Yours. Mine. Katherine’s. Terri’s.’
‘Terri’s?’
‘We are all entangled. You, me and Kat since the night of the fire back in ’81. Terri with me, and hence with the rest of us, since the Blackout. There’s a level of reality for living beings where we are like those girls, like those photons – where something that affects one of us, affects all of us. Now, answer your Quad when it rings.’
Robert closed his eyes. He tried to keep a lid on his fear. He didn’t understand. He let the Quad ring and ring. Eventually he answered.
‘Robert?’
It was Adam. He twisted round in his seat. No one was there. He darted his eyes around the park. Couldn’t see him.
‘Adam. Where did you go?’
‘Walk. Get up and walk east. I assume you have a riddle?’
‘Wait. No riddles. Not yet.’
‘Robert…’
‘Lawrence Hencott. You went to see him right before he killed himself.’
‘Ah.’
‘How on earthdid you even know him?’
‘Please let’s not talk about this now.’
‘We talk about this right now or I walk away.’
‘You can’t.’
‘Watchme.’
There was a pause. Did he have any leverage? Or had he just lost Adam? And maybe Terri?
After what seemed an age, Adam answered. ‘I had to see him. I was… compelled to.’
‘Why did he kill himself?’
Adam gave a cry of pain. ‘I am… shielding us from… Iwnw… scavengers… I can’t do it… if we talk about this now.’
‘Why did he kill himself?’
‘Please…’
‘Tell me.’
‘To… protect… you.’
The line went dead.
Robert tried to recall Lawrence’s words in the phone call. Hurt you… bullet… scavenger… die.
Had it been not a threat but a warning?
The Quad buzzed again. ‘Robert.’
‘What do you mean, to protect me?’
‘Find the cache first, and I’ll tell you. Please.’
‘Don’t you know where the cache is?’
‘No – not this one, not any of them. They won’t tell me. Don’t trust me.’
‘Who?’
‘Find the cache, Robert. Didn’t they send you a clue?’
‘No, not yet.’
‘Check your Quad again.’
‘Who’s sending it?’
‘The Watchman.’
‘You’ll find out very soon, I’m sure.’
Then the Quad buzzed, and Robert had a new text message:
A living tree’s the place to be
Steer your helm towards an elm
I’m not barmy, I’m just a swami
The first of three, a trinity
How fire entangles, in love triangles
Yet to atone, you walk alone
To survive your desire
Pass the Trial by Fire
At the end it gave two more waypoints.
Beautiful curved railings in black forged-iron lined the park’s paths. Robert followed the path that took him most directly eastwards, scanning his surroundings for a sight of Adam. He came almost immediately to a tree with garlands around its trunk and flowers strewn among its roots. It was an American Elm. Ulmus Americana. He found a plaque on the chicken-wire fence near by. It told him that, on October 9, 1966, A. C. Bhakhtivedanta Swami Prabhupada and his followers sat beneath the tree and held the first outdoor chanting session outside of India of Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare… The Beat poet Allen Ginsberg was there. The event was recognized as the founding of the Hare Krishna religion in the United States.
‘Robert.’
‘Yes.’
‘You have it?’
‘Concentrate. Find the cache. Read me the clue.’
Robert read it to him.
‘Did you become a Krishna and not tell anyone?’
‘No. That’s not the point. Just go with the notion of the joy. If it helps, Jimi Hendrix played in this park. It’s also named after the guy who abolished slavery in the state of New York. Look away from the specific.’
Robert wheeled around the tree, looking for a hint of something buried. He looked over it for crannies and cracks… Nothing. Back to the plaque. To the fence. He ran his fingers around the bases of the fenceposts. Nothing. Then something drew his attention higher up in the tree, a hollow well above head-height.
He called over a beaten-up-looking man sitting on a nearby benchand offered him five dollars for a leg-up. They settled on ten. With the man’s back against the tree and his hands making a stirrup, Robert was able to climb up and dig his fingers into the cavity. He felt a fishing line and pulled on it. It was attached to another clear plastic tube.
‘I have it.’
‘Discretion, Robert. Please.’
He dropped to the ground and looked about. No one seemed to be paying attention. Upon inspection, the tube contained an irregular four-sided piece of metal, perhaps an inchlong. It seemed to be made of the same alloy as the Malice Box.
‘I need to put something on the website.’
‘Not yet. This is a three-parter, I suspect. Now walk north. There’s something you need to see.’
Robert slipped the metal shape into a zipped pocket on his trousers. A pattern was forming in his mind, just beyond his ability to recognize it. He followed the park’s curving paths towards the northern end, where a onestorey building of men’s and women’s lavatories stood, with a gate in between them to a garden behind. He passed a curious structure that on closer inspection turned out to be a fountain, a mythical water carrier atop it on a pyramidal stone roof with the word temperance carved into it.
‘Keep moving, Robert.’
He passed a ship’s flagpole and came to the comfort station. Through the gate he could see a pink marble stela, maybe nine feet tall.
‘Go take a look, Robert. This is death by fire.’
It was a monument, with bas-relief renderings of two children’s faces.
In memory of those who lost their lives in the disaster to the steamer General Slocum, June XV, MCMIV
They were earth’s purest, children young and fair
‘More than a thousand died, mostly women and children,’ Adam said. ‘Look at that little boy’s face.’
‘Are you trying to fuck with my head?’
‘Not in the least, Robert, not at all. But I’m saying Moss’s death will be as nothing if you don’t come further into the hunt.’
‘Further in? What do you mean further in? I already said I want to help you.’
‘The General Slocum caught fire as it headed up the East River. It was a day trip for the children of Little Germany. You’ll notice there isn’t one of those in New York any more. Not after this. The captain beached on North Brother Island in the East River to try to save the passengers. That’s where Typhoid Mary was interned and died, if you didn’t know. The Slocum disaster was the greatest loss of life for any fire in New York City. Biggest disaster before 9/11.’
‘And?’
‘9/11 was, what, about three times bigger?’
‘More or less. Different category.’
‘What we are dealing with here – what you’d be helping to stop – would be perhaps ten thousand times bigger. We can stop it, but only if we continue the game for now.’
‘What on earth are you talking about?’
‘Death by fire. You need to give me the keys you have so far.’
‘That’s not going to happen.’
‘You need to think. I understand that. You should expect another waypoint soon.’
‘I already have it. Number 101.’
‘Start walking, I’ll be back to you.’
Robert walked through the asphalt basketball courts where kids shouted and hollered, and got a Quad signal at the corner of East 10th, accurate to 37 feet. It showed Waypoint 101 was about two thirds of a mile to the west, near Washington Square Park.
Robert racked his brains as he walked along East 1 oth. Record anything that leaps out at you. It’ll be important.
He passed a red-brick Gothic Revival church, St Nicholas of Myra. Something struck him about it. He stopped and stared till he saw what it was. There were strange sculpted heads on the walls, their faces… peeling away? Cut up? Maybe made of leaves? They were like the ones he’d seen on John Street. They made him shudder.
Across the street he noticed a curios and antiques store, a dressmaker’s mannequin outside on the street, old military and anatomical items in the window. There was another one on First Avenue, across the street from the Coyote Ugly Bar, selling old typewriters, musical instruments, lamps, models of military missiles, a beautiful black girdle. Compared to SoHo, the neighbourhood had a grungier, student-rich feel. He passed a store called Vinyl Market selling techno twelve-inch records.
The GPS signal kept cutting out mid block and returning at the corners. ‘Need clear view of sky’ flashed up on the screen.
As he reached Second Avenue, a church came into view, angled in defiance of the Manhattan grid, its pediment and steeple above a colonnaded porch echoing those of St Paul’s Chapel downtown.
Adam called again. ‘Robert, where are you?’
‘Can’t you tell where I am, like Terri?’
‘I’m not psychic the way she is. I can’t do what she does.’
‘Aren’t you watching me? I’m just opposite St Mark’s in-the-Bowery. I’m crossing the street to go into the graveyard now.’
‘A rich man’s corpse was stolen from there and held for ransom at the end of the nineteenth century, did you know? His widow had to bargain to free his body.’
‘I didn’t know that.’
‘We’re about ransoming the dead too, my friend. The future dead. Our man Tompkins, the freer of slaves, is buried there. Also your man Thomas Addis Emmet lies in a vault there. The one who’s absent from his obelisk at St Paul’s.’
‘I read everything you posted. It’s part of the game.’
‘I’m going to start needing better answers than that.’
‘Calm down. You’ll have them.’
Emmet’s vault was a stone slab in the paved churchyard. The image of an empty chamber beneath an obelisk teased at his mind. He noticed a large cracked bell in one corner of the churchyard, heavy iron bolts holding it in its frame. The bolts meant something to him too. Indefinable images rushed at him. He placed his hands on the bell, closing his eyes, hearing again the chanting in his dream.
Fat Mary Fat Mary Fat Mary…
He couldn’t. He willed the images away, and with them the fear.
The Quad pointed him directly along Stuyvesant Street, diagonally across the Manhattan grid. Less than half a mile to go. He crossed Third Avenue in front of Cooper Union, past the Budapest-inspired Astor Place subway entrance, one of a handful of reproductions of the original elegant subway entrance designs. As he neared Lafayette Street, a great lamp glowed red to the north atop the Con Ed Building.
He passed alongside a Barnes & Noble bookstore to the corner of Broadway, along what used to be called Obelisk Lane. Now the spire of Grace Church came into view as he looked north. Then, as he crossed Broadway, the Woolworth Building swept into view to the south. The two Gothic towers connected, drawing lines like the threads on the map board in his study. Great sweeping geometries flashed in his mind.
The signal returned again at Broadway. A tenth of a mile to go.
He walked south past cheap low-rise stores and right on to Waverly Place, following the arrow, 460 feet to go. It pointed left on Mercer, then right on Washington Place… 177 feet… directly ahead to the corner of Greene Street. ‘Arriving Destination’ flashed up, 79 feet, pointing directly at a building on the corner of Washington Place and Greene. At around 30 feet the arrow began to go round and round, slowly spinning within its own range of error.
He looked about him for any further clues. Then the Quad rang.
‘Are you there yet?’
‘Standing right at the waypoint.’
‘Where is it?’
‘Washington Place and Greene.’
‘Oh… I see. Yes. Of course.’
‘What am I looking for?’
‘You’re going to need a bit of time to absorb that place. Read the plaque on the building at Washington Place and Greene, north-west corner.’
‘What is it?’
‘More death by fire, my friend. This is what you’d be helping to prevent if you do what I say.’
He read the plaque: ‘On this site 146 workers lost their lives in the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire on March 25, 1911…’
‘Oh, God.’
He knew the story, but hadn’t recognized the location. The awful sound of women screaming, falling through the air, some hand in hand, like the poor people who jumped from the Twin Towers, smashing into the sidewalk on Greene Street. Young women trapped behind locked and blocked doors on the top floors as the flames tore through the factory, driving them to the windows. An inferno at their backs. Leaping to their deaths. He could feel it. He could see it. The pain was unbearable. The street resonated with violence. It was not his imagination. For a moment, he was actually there, psychically connected to the pain and fear of the women. He felt energy flare around him and subside. Then it was gone, as suddenly as it had come. He was like a broken radio, picking up snatches of signals from the air.
Adam was talking to him. ‘Robert, what’s the most precious thing in your life?’
‘My marriage. The memory of Moss. The idea of him, rather.’
‘Once again. You need to give me the keys you have collected so far. There’ll be a ring or cylinder of some kind, a pair of interlocked circles, and the one you get today.’
‘Can’t do that, Adam.’
‘If you don’t, I’ll make sure Katherine learns everything about you and Terri. Everything. We both know her. She’ll leave you.’
‘She wouldn’t believe you.’
‘When did you guys last… never mind. There are pictures. Video. Terri didn’t know, if it makes you feel any better.’
‘What? What has happened to you, you sick fuck?’
‘The only way out is deeper in. You need to give me the keys.’
‘No way.’
‘You need to think about this very carefully.’
‘Blackmail. You. I can’t believe it.’
‘Focus. You have to think of what’s best for Katherine. Now go get the next cache. What’s the clue?’
It was almost the same as before:
A hangman’s tree’s the place to be
Turn your helm to another elm
The second of three, a trinity
How fire entangles, in love triangles
Yet to atone, you walk alone
To survive your desire
Pass the Trial by Fire
A cold detachment came over Robert, the one that possessed him whenever he felt himself under attack. Had they really been videotaped? Did it matter?
He was beginning to see a pattern. He felt himself gaining advantage. He would overcome this. He would not be treated like a plaything. He needed to play for time.
‘The keys. I’ll think about it.’
‘Good. What’s the clue?’
He read it to him.
‘As you go, look out for old Garibaldi.’
As he walked into the park, Robert passed a dramatic statue of the Italian military genius, caught in the act of unsheathing his sword. What was salient? Garibaldi in exile had shared a house on Staten Island with a man called Meucci who’d supposedly invented the telephone before Alexander Graham Bell. A glass vessel was found under the base of his statue when it was moved in 1970, a glass time capsule containing newspaper clippings from the 1880s about his death and the erection of the statue. Something precious, delicate, hidden…
He walked towards the circular fountain in the centre of the park, looking about him and taking in the square. Henry James territory along its northside. New York University east, southand all around. A hulking red-brick NYU building reminded him of a nuclear reactor. Legend said one of the elms in the north-west corner of the park had been used for public hangings. He looked for the tree. The West Village lay ahead of him, where the quest had started at Adam’s secret apartment two days before.
Turn your helm to another elm…
He found it. Even bedecked in leaves, it was a sinister, clawing, twisted creature. A tree of death.
The park had been a military parade ground, a potter’s field, a place of public execution, whether from this elm or others. And before that a marsh, fed by Minetta Brook, the stream that still flowed under Lower Manhattan. In Native American lore, the Minetta, or Manetta, was a serpent.
He inspected the Hangman’s Elm. Only a tiny green plaque on its trunk identified it. He stepped over the low railings on to the grass to look more closely. Explored around the base. Found a green drawing pin driven into the earth. The cache was deep among the roots near by, below the ground in soft soil.
The tube contained two items identical to the first, oddly angled geometric forms that seemed to fit together in a form he couldn’t fathom. He stashed them safely in his pocket. He walked over to the park’s chess tables in the south-west corner and declined several offers to play a game.
‘Tables for chess and checkers only. No loitering’ a sign said. ‘Two-hour limit per table. Free for public use. No gambling or fees.’ He sat and loitered, waiting for the next call. He knew what he had to do. It was time to take control. He was afraid of the pain it would bring, but he had to do it.
His mind turned again to the strange faces on St Nicholas Church and at John Street. Flayed faces? Harvest gods? Disguises of some kind?
After a few minutes, the Quad rang: ‘You have it?’
‘I have them, to be exact. Same as the first one. I have three pieces now.’
‘One more to go, then, I would guess. What’s the next waypoint?’
Robert looked at the Quad. It was 036.
‘I’ll tell you when I’m there.’
He walked to the north-west corner of the park again, by the Hangman’s Elm, and circled till he got a new signal. The Quad said just over half a mile, pointing west. He took Waverly Place. Crossing Sixth Avenue, he saw the turret of the strangely beautiful red-brick Jefferson Square Market Building swing into view to the north. A pyramidion atop a square clock face, atop a cylindrical tower, atop an octagonal base. He remembered an Art Deco prison had stood on the site of its garden, demolished now, that had featured a revolving altar for use by prisoners of different beliefs. It was the only prison he’d ever wanted to see the inside of.
The Watchman gauged Robert’s progress, weighing the risks and the knife-edge balance of the plan. Half-formed images came to the Watchman’s mind. Adam pushing Robert, Robert resisting. Robert wrestling with dilemmas, with fear. Adam fighting the Iwnw, ceding ground, pretending to do the devil’s bidding, concealing, dissembling. Straining towards the light. Deep inside Katherine, as she prepared to go deeper undercover, lay a hidden dark core. No one could see what resided there.
The Watchman saw the maker of the Ma’rifat’, suspended between lives, latched into Adam’s DNA, unable to forgive, unable to forget. Unable to die. Saw Terri’s cancer, suspended in time. Then he looked again. He saw with impotent horror that it had now become unfrozen.
Soon, when he came out of his trance, Horace would return to the preparations for burying his brother. Pain awaited him there.
The Watchman prayed for himself, and for them all.
As he walked, Robert soon found himself knee-deep in triangular motifs.
He reached the three-sided nineteenth-century Northern Dispensary, a street-naming anomaly: Waverly Place on two of its sides and both Christopher Street and Grove Street on the third side. Edgar Allan Poe had been a customer in the days when they handed out laudanum.
He came to Christopher Park, created as a triangular open space at the request of residents after a fire ripped through the area in 1835.
Next to the park was a bar with a triangular gouge out of its corner at street level, the shape etched into the sidewalk. Two strange carved artisans held up the lintel above the missing shape, seemingly crushed by its weight. In another of the carvings a naked woman rode a sea monster.
He realized he had come to the irregular star formation of streets where he’d taken the Christopher Street subway two days earlier.
He crossed the street to the triangular plaque in the street outside Village Cigars, commemorating the refusal of a former owner of the site to sell 5 00 square inches of his property to the city authorities.
Following the Quad’s arrow, he retraced his steps of Thursday along Christopher, past the tattoo parlours, gay bars, fetish clothing stores. He came again to the stars in the sidewalk where Terri had first reached him on the Quad.
God, he wanted Terri. His body stirred at the thought of her.
He realized where he was going to end up, as the GPS unit counted down the feet to the intersection of Charles and Greenwich Street. He arrived outside a white-painted, higgledy-piggledy two-storey wooden house, its lines so out of true it looked like a Stealthplane design. Across the street was the building where Adam had his pied-a-terre. He stood and waited for the Quad to buzz again.
The third of three, a trinity
You need to dowse a crooked house
Our cache’s host, an iron post
How fire entangles, in love triangles
Yet to atone, you walk alone
To survive your desire
Pass the Trial by Fire
Robert knelt by the iron railing of the gate that led into the wooden house’s front yard. At its base, clinging magnetically to the railing and painted the same black, was the last part of the puzzle. He quickly pocketed it and stood up.
Then Adam called. ‘Robert? Where are you?’
‘I can’t look at this house without getting dizzy. It distorts the space around it.’
‘Dutch farmhouse from the early eighteenth century. Brought here on a truck in 1968 from the Upper East Side to save it from demolition. The lady who wrote Goodnight Moon lived in it before it was moved. Observe the garden.’
The house sat on a triangular plot of land. He gazed through the railings. Atop a feeding pole, he saw a tiny white bird house with crazy roof angles and canted angles: a perfect miniature and echo of the house itself.
‘It’s a bit like the key to the Ma’rifat’ that I sent you,’ Adam said. ‘The small one is a perfect miniature of the big one. Now, there’s something in my old apartment you need to see.’
‘What’s going to be up there this time? Is it you?’
‘No.’
‘Terri?’
‘No. Sorry.’
‘Anyone I know?’
‘No one’s in this time at the House of Spells. Go up.’
‘As it happens, I really need to pee. I thought you’d never ask.’
Robert took out his keys and let himself in. He started up the stairs.
‘Five flights. Thank you.’
‘Enjoy.’
He opened the door. The apartment had been stripped bare. The blinds were lowered, and the only light came from a single electric-blue lava lamp on the floor where Adam’s desk had been.
‘You’re going for a certain seventies minimalism, I see. Nice.’
‘What music would you recommend to go with it?’
‘Kraftwerk, maybe. Was this your love-nest with Terri? Others too?’
‘I take the fifth. Do you have the complete key now?’
Robert held the four pieces of the puzzle in his hand.
‘They go together somehow. Can’t see how. What did you want me to see up here?’
‘Wait. I’ll be back in touch.’ He rang off.
Robert went into the small kitchen at the rear of the apartment and raised the blind. All four pieces of the key were identically shaped, all magnetically charged. He twisted them against each other. And twisted. And twisted.
Adam called back a few minutes later. ‘Are you done?’
‘Almost.’
‘Loser. It’s supposed to be a fricking pyramid.’
‘I knew that. I could see that.’
‘Robert, give me the keys. You have to.’
‘No.’
‘You know, Katherine wasn’t just seeing her friend in the West Village yesterday. She met me too.’
‘What?’
‘Listen. Please. I’m going to send you a photograph. We were in Washington Square Park. Look closely at it. We’ve been in touch for a while, but I asked her to keep it secret. She tried to help me last year. And she did. Now she wants to know what’s going on. How much she could tell you. This isn’t a threat. It’s a reminder of what’s at stake.’
The file landed. He opened it up on the Quad screen.
The photo showed Katherine, in the dress she’d been wearing the previous day, sitting on a park bench. Around her head was a cloud of darkness. And in it, Robert saw again the face of death. It was the single, beautiful, seductive eye, flaring with yellow-and-blue light, the dead black core at its centre. Was this the face of Iwnw? Were they going to come after Kat? How much could he believe of what Adam was saying?
Robert shouted into the phone: ‘Adam…’
‘If you won’t give me the keys…’
The connection went dead.
Robert stared out of the kitchen window, fighting his fear. Then he noticed a faint hissing sound coming from the oven. A glimmer of flame, like a spark, blinked into existence on one of the top burners. The spark grew and stretched into a tiny string of fire that twisted upwards from the burner, arching slowly into space. It was followed by a second, a snake of flame turning in slow motion in the air before his eyes.
A web of burning strands of light formed before him as he watched, frozen, spellbound; and slowly it formed into a shimmering human figure, standing before him in a filigree of flame. For a moment the figure held, then melted in upon itself and re-formed as a shifting, rippling face of fire.
‘Robert.’
It was a voice he knew but couldn’t place. ‘Who… who are you?’
‘I watchover you.’
The voice was a sonorous whisper, threaded with the hiss of the gas and a note of deep power, a distant thunder.
‘What’s happening?’
‘The kitchen is exploding. It’s already begun. This is all happening in a fraction of a second. But don’t worry. I’m warning you in time.’
‘How is this possible?’
‘You are starting to learn to see.’
‘This whole place is going to blow?’
‘It already is. You’d never survive, normally.’
The strands of fire melted again and re-formed in a shifting human figure, as tall as Robert, that rippled like a reflection on water.
‘How can this be happening?’
‘Time exists differently for all of us. It is part of a cage we build for ourselves. You are opening the door of the cage. You are walking out of yourself. Out of your small, sleeping, ego-bound self.’
‘I’m just trying to survive.’
The tendrils of flame started to fatten, swelling to obliterate the figure’s body and face and coiling into thick ropes of fire.
Still he heard the voice. ‘I hope there’s more to it than that. You are being attacked by the ones who call themselves Iwnw. They are feeding on the psychic energy of Adam to do this. I am just able to intervene, to insert myself into their attack, long enough to give you a chance to survive. You’ll need to use the window, by the way. You’ll never make it if you take the door.’
‘What is your name?’
‘I am the Watchman. You know me as Horace. Robert, run!’
Robert reached over the kitchen sink and tried to pull the window up. It wouldn’t budge. The flames thickened. He took a saucepan and smashed the glass, clearing out the frame as much as possible and then levering himself up on to the sink, poking his head through the window, then his shoulders. He twisted sideways, one hand on his eyes, one on his groin to shield himself from broken glass, and kicked with his feet against the wall of the sink.
He flew horizontally out of the window as the ropes of flame coalesced into a single ball of fire and exploded in a booming, roaring shock-wave.
He fell on to the roof of the neighbouring apartment one floor below, rolling and tumbling as debris fell all around him. Then he lay on his back, hyperventilating with shock, saying over and over: ‘Dear God. Dear God.’
Bleeding from a cut on his thigh, his arms and legs shaking, Robert made his way down to the street on the fire escape, hearing sirens approach. He felt a voice in his head, an intuition that seemed like an order: Get away. The authorities can’t help. Get away. He felt defiance in his heart. He was getting stronger. They had failed to kill him again. He was growing on the Path.
He limped north from the Goodnight Moon house along Greenwich Street, until he found a stoop to sit on for a moment to examine his wound. It was superficial, by the look of it, though a dull throbbing was settling into his leg. He’d been lucky. Or was there any such thing as luck?
He looked back at the apartment building. There was no fire now, and it looked like the explosion had, somehow, directed all its force outwards from the top floor, causing no damage below. Neighbours were pointing up at the blown-out windows of Adam’s place, and a police car was arriving on the scene.
His hands were still shaking.
The slow-motion explosion was already like a dream in his mind. Had he seen Horace speaking to him in the midst of the flames? Had he been hallucinating? What was real and what were tricks of his imagination?
He couldn’t go on much longer. Yet he had to.
He thought of Adam’s threat of blackmail. Robert made up his mind. He would call Adam’s bluff, take back the initiative. Tell Kat about Terri before Adam could. However muchit hurt.
He turned his mind to practicalities. How to get home. How to warn Katherine.
Years ago she’d insisted they establish emergency codes in case either of them was ever in danger. With her past, prudence and habit died hard. He made the call.
‘Katherine?’
‘Robert? What’s up? Are you OK?’
‘Hi, my darling. I’m fine. Just to let you know I never got that migraine I thought was coming on this morning. I may have to work late with Derek, but I’ll leave as soon as I can. And, hey, I got tickets for the Lion King at last. Very happy about that. Guess which night?’
‘Which? Tonight?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’d better get ready, then.’
She hung up. His hands left damp imprints on the phone casing. The humidity had risen as the day wore on. He was drenched in sweat now. His eyes stung with salt and the throb in his leg was deepening.
He flagged down a cab and offered a generous fare to New Jersey. Just as they were nearing the Lincoln Tunnel, Katherine called back. ‘You’re going to have to take back those tickets, sorry. I just remembered we have Orlando coming to dinner.’
‘Oh, shit. You’re right. I’ll do that. See you soon.’ Migraine and Lion King meant that she should go to a safe place outside the house that only he and she knew about. The fact that she’d called meant she was there.
Knowing she was safe, he went to their house first and cleaned up, changing his clothes and disinfecting his cuts. Their current safe location was their friend Kerry’s house, a few miles from their own, and it was almost three thirty when he got there, after following a circuitous route. They both had keys. Katherine would look in on her cats whenever Kerry travelled for work, which was frequently. This week she was in Chicago. As he slid the key into the lock, he remembered the sound of his father coming home to the cottage in the evenings after working late on the grounds, the sense of security that it gave as he heard the door latch being lifted, the hope that he would come to Robert’s room and talk about his day for a while. Yet, as he entered Kerry’s house, he felt as though he were bringing something alien with him, something dangerous and unwelcome. Katherine was sitting in the front room in loose-fitting trousers and a light jacket. Her boots were on, and he knew she’d have a pistol concealed close by. She gave a barely audible ‘Hi’ to his whispered greeting. He walked over and kissed her head.
‘It’s all going to be fine,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry if I frightened you.’
‘Crazy day. You showered?’
She looked straight into him. He felt a flutter on his flesh and behind his eyes. Was she trying to read him? He’d never had such a sensation before.
‘Did you hear about the bomb-plot arrests?’
‘No?’
‘NYPD arrested two guys, an American and a Pakistani, for planning to blow up Herald Square subway station. Said they had all the intent but no actual explosives.’
‘Did they really know what they were doing?’
‘Sounds like it. No suggestion of links to organized groups, though. Is this anything to do with that?’
‘No.’
‘What’s the threat?’
Katherine’s training could make her very no-nonsense. They were well matched, that way.
‘We have been deceiving each other, somewhat.’
‘What’s the threat?’
‘What did Adam tell you yesterday?’
‘Let’s be clear about something. He came to me last year –’
‘Asked you to keep it secret. I know. What did he want help with?’
‘He wouldn’t say. Back then all he’d say was that he was going to be going up against someone very powerful, and he wanted to know if any of my gifts had returned. I told him no, but he asked me to try anyway.’
‘When was that exactly?’
‘The morning of the Blackout. August 14. And he swore me to secrecy. To protect you. He said he wouldn’t involve you unless he absolutely had to.’
‘And yesterday?’
‘He said somehow the person he had to fight a year ago has come back. He said somehow we are vulnerable, because since the night of the fire at Cambridge we are all… entangled, he said. What do you have that’s newer than that?’
He showed her the picture. She stared at the screen, wordlessly.
‘Adam sent me it not a couple of hours ago. He’s been drawing me into this same thing, you know that. But there’s something very… dark going on with him. I don’t believe he can control it. I don’t know if he can win.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean suppose he needs me not to stop this terrible act of obscenity but to cause it? Suppose it’s all a trick? He threatens you, but he says it’s to protect you. He threatens me…’
She looked him in the eyes. ‘How?’
He couldn’t meet her gaze. ‘Just bullshit stuff. I’m not afraid of him.’
‘You’re afraid of something.’
‘Less so than I was. I don’t know how to explain.’
‘This thing in the picture. Have you seen it before?’
‘It’s death. Foregathering. Don’t ask me how I know.’
‘You saw it the night of the fire. In Adam’s room. I know.’
His head swam with secrets, with things he had seen and denied his whole life, things he’d considered forbidden, things he could scarcely credit he’d seen in the last three days. What could he tell her? What should he say?
‘You’ve seen it too, Kat?’
‘I have. In dreams. And I felt it in Adam’s room that night in Cambridge, though I didn’t know what it was at the time.’
‘What is it?’
‘It’s malevolent. It lives in a potential world, not quite in existence but constantly seeking to exist. It feeds on pain, confusion, fear. It’s connected to free will somehow. When someone chooses to do ill, or even has the opportunity to do so, it draws near. When people stumble into psychic areas they’re not equipped to deal with, it sees an opportunity. It brings death, yes.’
‘How is it related to these people called Iwnw?’
‘I’m not sure what more I can say. Each of us has a role in this, Robert, and it has to be played out. Some things are only valuable to you if you discover them for yourself. I think, from what Adam said, that the Iwnw live in this world and the next. They have people in every generation who act for them, a kind of priesthood, if you like, and then they are also this… eye.’
‘I’m starting to understand some of this. But I need help. There are people who fight them, yes? Horace? Has he been watching over us all this time?’
‘You remember that night at the Round Church? That’s the only time you met him while he was mentoring Adam in England.’
‘Oh, my God.’
Hour by hour, his life was being remade. Nothing was as it had seemed. He saw protective forces everywhere around him, throughout his life, trying to shield him from his own nature. His parents. Adam and Kat. Horace.
‘I have to be who I am now,’ he said, not realizing he was speaking out loud.
Kat said nothing.
She smiled. ‘No. You weren’t ready until now. One thing you need to realize is that Adam says he is shielding us. Protecting us. I believe him.’
‘I don’t know if I do, Kat. I believe he wants to, but –’
His cell phone rang. It was Horace. He kissed Katherine and walked into the kitchen to talk.
‘Robert, my friend. Are you OK?’
‘You saved my life.’
‘Only just. I was just able to tip the balance in your favour. I hadn’t realized Adam was so powerfully in the grip of the others. They used him to get to you.’
‘He’s still resisting, though, isn’t he? I felt he was fighting.’
‘Yes, but he is losing faster than I thought. Robert, you must pay attention to everything, to every internal voice, every seeming coincidence, every sensation you receive from people.’
Anger flared in Robert’s heart. ‘I’m going as fast as I can! I’ve been attacked three times! People are trying to kill me, for Christ’s sake.’
‘You’re not alone in that regard. I’m between bases too, we might say. Home is not the most recommendable location for me at the moment. If I go home, I’ll be killed.’
‘What?’
‘It is time to grow up, Robert. For all of us.’
‘I’m sorry, I –’
‘Hush. I can’t stay on for long. They’ll find me, and Adam will kill me.’
‘Adam?’
‘Just like he killed Lawrence. Or forced him to die. I will die too, if I must. To protect you.’
‘Understand, Robert: understand what is at stake here. Truly.’
‘Who are they, Horace?’
‘The Iwnw are scavengers of the soul. In this world and the next. Parasites. They are using the Minotaur as a kind of gateway into Adam. Quickly, tell me everything else that happened today.’
Robert recounted everything.
‘You must go on. You must stay in it with Adam. You must.’
‘But you said he’s going to kill you?’
‘He is battling. He is not yet lost. But his willpower is not inexhaustible. When he tires, he is not in command of his actions.’
‘Can he be saved?’
‘Yes, Robert. You can save him. And everyone. But only if you risk losing.’
‘Losing what?’
‘Losing everything.’
His mind hared in twenty directions. He let it. He was learning to trust.
‘Horace, have I completed the third trial? Have I passed?’
‘Let me gather my thoughts for a moment.’
Horace fell silent. Robert recognized something in himself more strongly than before, something he knew from his regular life, that already seemed years in the past: he was committed now. He wanted to see it through, regardless of the cost. The alternative was too awful to bear thinking about.
‘The third trial focuses on freedom,’ Horace said. ‘It places you in a situation where your autonomy and independence, your ability to stand on your own two feet and decide your own fate, are placed under unbearable pressure. These are the powers of fire, the energies that drive ambition, self-respect, the pursuit of achievement, the force of pride. This trial has brought you deeper into the nature of the race to stop the Ma’rifat’ exploding. To pass the trial, you have to discover what lies at the outer limits of freedom and pay a terrible price: entering the shadow of this power, you have to choose between submitting to blackmail or losing your wife.’
‘I have made that choice. I am going to tell her.’
‘Many aspirants to knowledge of the Path fall at this stage, in one of two ways: they either fail to tap the fire powers to create a healthy ego and sense of independence, or they fail to transcend self-infatuation. Tell me, as you reject this blackmail and establish this freedom of action, what do you see at the outer limits of freedom?’
It was the same question asked by the letter, in a different way: Seek freedom’s far bourns. ‘Absolute freedom means absolute loneliness, absolute isolation. It will cost me Kat, but I’ve had no choice but to take these actions if I’m to survive.’
‘Good. You will have recovered a key in four parts, forming a triangle or pyramid, and you will have discovered another part of your shattered body of light. If you had failed at this stage, you would have perished. I would not have been able to help you if you had not developed the strength to survive. You have passed the trial.’
Tears suddenly filled Robert’s eyes. He was exhausted, frightened and bewildered. But he was alive, and fighting, and learning what he needed to fight better. He was proud.
‘Robert, are you there?’
He composed himself, clearing his throat and scanning his mind for questions. ‘One thing. I saw something that disturbed me on a church in the East Village. A head, a face, that looked… flayed? Leafy? It’s hard to describe.’
‘The Green Man,’ Horace said immediately. ‘Good. What you saw is a foliate mask. A lot of nonsense is spoken about him, but at heart there is something you need. It stands for life. Remember it. One other thing. Does the term “Water Tunnel Number One” mean anything to you?’
‘The big new one they are building? That’s going to take thirty years?’
‘No, that’s Number Three. Coming along quite nicely now, actually, with the new drills. But no, I mean Number One. Follow its path. You may find it illuminating. Now I have to go. It’s dangerous to talk longer.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘What I must do. I’m going to help you fight.’
Then he was gone.
Robert went back into the living room to his wife. He took a deep breath.
‘How’s Horace?’
‘Katherine. I’ve been unfaithful to you. I had sex with Terri yesterday.’
My father was not just a scientist; he was a dreamer and a man of deep spiritual concerns. He was a teacher, a physicist, a chemist and, beyond that, a mystic, an explorer of God’s mysteries. There are no longer words in English for what he studied, though in Chaucer’s time –yes, I am a learned Arab, remember? – he would have been called an alkamystere.
Take chemistry, take alchemy, take mystey, and combine them. That is the lost science. Alcumysttie, it was later called. I sat at his feet. I learned. I have applied it.
I had prayed that 9/11 would be enough. That America would learn. That the great wave of compassion and selflessness that it provoked would last and spread into the world. But it did not. And I concluded, amid tears, that something far bigger was needed.
I love New York. Even more was required of New York. Not only to show compassion and enormous heart in the face of attack but even more, for the sake of the world: to die. This great heart had to be stopped; it had to make the ultimate sacrifice, the ultimate leap into the divine.
When the Device was accidentally triggered, I died to the physical world. But now I dwell in a place of no time and no space, where light dwells. For particles of light, there is no time, and all places are the same place. Now I am a Man of Light, and I observe the workings of the world I left as one thing. I am a newborn child. I am a dying man. I am working at the RHIC. I am burying my grandfather. I am knowing a woman for the first time. I am holding my mother in my arms. I am building the Device. I am doing and being all these things.
From here I can see everything. I can see all of us. I see the afternoon of August 14, 2003 in every single detail. I circle above the north-eastern United States like an eagle and watch the spreading fingers of the Blackout. I see the electricity surging madly back and forth along the power lines. I see the darkness metastasize. I see the world cracking like ice. I swoop down and enter bodies and feel their most intimate sensations. I see each of us connected to the others along the hairline cracks and fault lines exposed by the detonation.
I see myself die.
I see Robert and Katherine making love. I see Terri hyperventilating lost in sensation, lost to herself. I see her lose her sight.
I see Adam. I see him fighting. I see him in a burning room. Always I see him in a burning room. Always the same fire.
I see space and time bend.
I see deep into my soul. I see the flaw. I see, too late, the wrong turn I should have rectified.
I see myself fail.
There is a sculpture in the water off Battey Park. It shows sailors reaching desperately down to try to rescue a drowning man who is completely covered when the tide is high. So are we all subsumed into the sea of God when our individual fears are drowned in a greater love… when all the fear is gone, the love at the core of each of us can flow through. This is how I see the world of men from my new dwelling in light. Tiny packets of love, pinched off from one another and from the world itself by fear. All the borders in the world are made of fear. We need them so we may grow to maturity, but then we must learn to take them down again, to transcend them. What power can achieve this?
At Brookhaven, in the collider programme where I worked, we wound back the clock of time so far that we were able to create matter in a form that has not been seen in the universe since ten microseconds after the Big Bang. It is called a quark-gluon plasma, but you can think of it as simply this: a liquid universe. The ocean from which we all came. The machine we used to collide gold with gold is so powerful that, before we were allowed to go ahead and use it, studies had to be made to show that fears we would destroy the earth were unfounded. One of the concerns was that we might destroy the entire known universe. This is not a joke. The report examining these issues, and concluding it was safe for us to go ahead, is publicly available. You can read it for yourself online.
Many years ago, as I excelled in my studies in London, the men of the Mukhabarat sought me out. One does not turn down an invitation from the intelligence services. They wished to ensure I would be willing to serve, come the day, as an asset for them when I began work in other countries. All these years later, I do not even know if they were from the Mukhabarat of my own country or another.
I did not go to work for them willingly. I gave them as little as possible. Their questions were stupid, their understanding minimal. I was a particle physicist, I had no desire to work on bomb programmes or to inform on my colleagues. But eventually, in the 1990s, they asked me to infiltrate a bomb programme in a foreign country. They arrested my father to focus my mind.
I went along but I decided secretly to strike back at them. I went to the British Embassy and offered to spy for them.
Now I am a man in love, and I burn with the pains of that love. It is a thirst that never can be slaked. I am a drop of rain, and my Beloved is the boundless sea. To join my Beloved I must dissolve myself back into the great ocean from which I came. I must seek annihilation in the joy of my love.
I knew my Beloved by a different name, but she told me her real name was Katherine.