‘This way,’ Horace said, leading them past horse-pulled carriages and stalls selling photographs of New York scenes, in the general direction of the Wollman Rink.
‘Horace,’ Terri shouted. ‘We don’t even have a waypoint yet.’
‘There are no more waypoints,’ he replied. ‘There are seven keys. We must work now with what we have. We need all the keys to stop the detonation. They need all the keys to make it explode in the fully hellish way they desire.’
Horace led them to a drinking fountain, past the rink, at the foot of a flight of stone steps.
Terri asked, ‘Can we stop for a second and look at what was in the last cache?’
Horace halted and dabbed his forehead with a handkerchief. ‘Yes, my dear. Of course. Up here.’
They climbed the stairs. At the top was an octagonal, single-storey building, surrounded on all sides by benches and chess tables. ‘The Chess and Checkers House,’ Horace said. ‘It was here that the trials were planned. Barely nine days ago.’ He took out a penknife and cut the plastic wrapping free from the package they’d found in the cache to reveal a black jewellery case. Inside was a pendant bearing a seven-pointed star in inlaid silver.
Terri put down the steel staff she had brought with her from the fight at Rockefeller Center and held her fingertips to it.
‘As I suspected,’ Horace said. ‘Gnostic star. It stands for mystical insight. The other geometric shapes also reflected aspects of the trials. One, the circle, signifies beginning. Two, the vesica piscis, signifies the womb, and cell division. Three, the triangle, is stability, the ability to stand alone. Four, the cube, the building block of the greater man through compassion. Five, the pentagram, creativity and regeneration, because it can replicate itself endlessly. Six, the Star of David, the union of two triangles representing heaven and earth, the spiritual and the physical.’
Robert’s head was splitting, the light burning his eyes. Terri helped him move into the shade. ‘This really hurts,’ he whispered to her.
‘I know,’ she said. ‘It’s what it takes. We’re going to get this done.’
Robert sat at a chess table and closed his eyes, losing himself in sensations he had never had before.
Since the jolt of energy from the column in the International Building, his vision had become flooded with light, as though he were staring at the sun with his head bound, unable to look away. Patterns and forms – the squares of the chess tables, the façades of the Deco buildings they had passed on Fifth Avenue, the octagonal form of the Chess and Checkers House – were hitting his consciousness like knife blades. Even the forms of trees and leaves felt like tattoos on his flesh. Waves of intense sensation were washing over him, emotions and physical stimuli as well as shapes and geometric forms. He could feel Terri’s anger and helplessness at Jay’s death, her burning, single-minded focus on survival, Horace’s implacable will to defeat the Iwnw. Robert was drifting in and out of a state of hypersensitivity so acute as to be unbearable. There was no peace, no calm. At the fringes of his consciousness he could hear the language of the birds, but it was a cacophony of screeches, without insight, without love.
‘Horace, Robert is hurting very badly,’ Terri said.
‘The building up is also the tearing down,’ said Horace, without sympathy. ‘I suggest we wait here. We will hear from Adam.’
In the myth, Osiris was sliced to pieces by Seth. Robert understood what it meant now. But then came the birth of Horus, the son, the bearer of light, to do battle. Despite the pain, he still trusted the Path. He was both Osiris and Horus. The new being would come from within the butchered old one. He had already felt it awaken. But he had still not recovered from the shock of hanging from the top of Rockefeller Center, stripped of all his powers, exposed and naked to his very core.
Die to live.
The seventh line of the letter he had burned. The words formed again in his mind.
Die to live.
He attempted to understand. Then he relented, and tried to help the others by lightening the tone. ‘Actually, this is pretty cool in some ways,’ he said. ‘I can feel you guys, I can see fricking auras around you, for God’s sake.’
Horace slapped him hard across the face.
Terri shouted at him: ‘Horace! What the fuck?’
‘Even here there is temptation, and it is the temptation of pride,’ Horace said, his voice hoarse with anger. ‘Be humble, or you will be humiliated.’
No one said another word for thirty minutes.
Eventually Horace relented. ‘I am sorry, Robert. The primitive self fights hardest when it is closest to extinction, and the shadow of this stage is spiritual pride. There is a poem by Hopkins, one of a series called the “Terrible Sonnets”, where he is wrestling with giving up what he calls his last strands of self.
‘Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist – slack they may be – these last strands of man
In me or, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;
Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.
‘You would do well to remember them. As we all must.’
Robert said nothing, his head lowered. He had expected the journey to end in enlightenment, in understanding. All he could see was darkness.
‘I know those sonnets, Horace,’ he said eventually. ‘One of them is the only thing I can think of to express what I felt when I was hanging off the observation deck.’
‘Which?’
‘Othe mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May, who ne’er hung there…
‘That’s how it feels now.’
Die to live.
‘Terri,’ Horace said, ‘you should tell Robert what else happened on the day of the Blackout.’
Terri took Katherine into the bedroom, the only other room where they could sit, while Adam sat at his desk, eyes closed, and began deep-breathing exercises.
She closed the door behind them. ‘Katherine, how can I help?’
Katherine sat down on the bed and looked up at Terri. ‘What is the Boîte à Malice, exactly?’
Terri felt Katherine’s curiosity about her as a woman. She was asking herself how Terri exhibited such power at her age, whether she was attracted to Adam, whether she was a manipulator or could be trusted. Terri also felt a powerful ambivalence in Katherine about her own long-dormant gift.
‘It’s a group of strong women having fun,’ Terri said with her best crooked smile. ‘We think up ways to solve problems that leave everyone feeling better for the experience.’
‘Is prostitution part of it?’
‘That’s not what I’d call it. Imagination is, and flirtation, and creativity, sure. Technological skills. Understanding money. But it’s all about reading people and seeing what they really need. We like to keep a witchy vibe, a little bit mischievous, a little bit dark and dangerous. I can read people real well. You?’
Katherine’s inner defences were steel. Terri could see nothing she was hiding.
‘I was always able to,’ Katherine said. ‘I just thought it was normal. But I had traumatic experiences. I was almost killed in a fire at university. I lost a dear friend. And it died off.’
Terri got a glimmer of a night long ago, a place of damp and cold, panic, fear, a fire. She shut off the image.
‘So, tell me how you used to tap into it. Before you really believed in it.’
Katherine looked at her with surprise. ‘You can see that far back? That deeply into me?’
‘No, but that’s how most of us start.’
Katherine recounted the sex magick, the Ouija board, fragments of the night of the fire that she could remember. There weren’t many.
‘And you frightened yourself? I certainly did when I started out.’
‘I was frightened to explore some of it, yes. But it was just a blip. Temporary burnout. I was burning all ends of the candle at once. I was twenty-one. Just a bit younger than you, I’d say.’
‘I started younger. I grew up in orphanages until I was sixteen. Life was tough. At first I used it just to survive. It’s only in the last couple of years that I’ve learned to use it to help other people.’
‘I need to know how to help Adam.’
‘Help him raise his power. Tap back into yours.’
‘I want to. I can’t find a way back.’
Terri suddenly saw part of what she was hiding. Her connection to Adam was stronger than she wanted to admit, even to herself. She loved Robert, but she had been married to Adam previously. She still desired him.
Terri saw that no outsider could ever break the bond between these three. Any woman who formed a relationship with either of these men would always be trumped by Katherine. The insight filled her with a sense of foreboding. She dismissed the thought from her mind.
‘Here’s what we need to do. We’re going to revisit that night of the fire, the night of your trauma, yes? Take the fear out of it. Take the power back from it. Find a way to give it to Adam for his fight today.’
Katherine met her eyes and held them. ‘What about my husband?’
‘His time will come to be freed of his fear. But he can help you too, Katherine. Tell me some of the words you used. The chants you didn’t believe in.’
‘I thought they were just tapping into the unconscious,’ Katherine said.
‘They were.’
‘But there’s more –’
‘There is, but nothing’s going to go wrong this time.’
Katherine sat in silence. Then she said the words, begining Time and place elide…
Terri took her hands gently and repeated the words back to her.
‘What I suggest is that, after you leave here, you go find your husband and make love to him. Haul him out of work. Whatever it takes,’ Terri said with a smile. ‘You’re going to use these words, and take the fear from them.’
Terri said again the words that Katherine had uttered over the Ouija board over twenty years earlier, defusing them, releasing them. Blessing them. She held an image of Katherine and her faceless husband in her mind and cast a halo of golden light over them.
‘Carry this light from me when you are with him,’ she said. ‘Start holding Adam in your mind now.’
Terri opened the door. She walked out and touched Adam gently on the arm to bring him out of his deep state. Katherine followed her.
‘Katherine’s going to leave now. We’ve done some work, and she’ll be sending you strength for the rest of the day.’
She held hands with both of them for a moment, letting currents of light course through their bodies as they stood in a triangle. Then she took Katherine to the door.
Robert listened in silence. So Terri had blessed their lovemaking, the day they’d conceived little Moss. Those magical incantations Katherine had used had been Terri’s idea to help her get back in touch with her gift.
‘And then I couldn’t bring myself to go home. He was awe-inspiring. Vibrant. After Katherine left, we took one look at eachother and just grabbed. Devoured eachother. Forget holding back the energy. Forget everything. I don’t know if I helped him prepare or not. Probably not. But he sure was going to die happy.’
‘Goodness,’ said Horace.
‘Afterwards, when he was getting ready to leave, I gave him my address. I told him not to return to his place after confronting his guy, but to come and see me. And I left him a talisman to wear. To link him to my strength.
‘I was home, around four in the afternoon, and suddenly I just got this enormous psychic shock-wave from Adam. Knocked me on my ass. All hell had broken loose around him. I knew he was alive, but… damn. When I got up, my gift was all over the place. I was an order of magnitude more sensitive, so it hurt even to walk, to think… and then I was numb, dead, couldn’t feel my own feet. I could feel Adam, he was fighting, he was in danger, he had my power, he had his own, but it was tough, he was hurting. I could feel it, and then I couldn’t. Back and forth, like waves of power surging into me and out of me.’
‘This was the Blackout?’
‘No, the Blackout hadn’t happened yet. Then seconds later it hit. Boom. All the lights went out. Another shockwave, bigger than the first. I felt like I was plugged into an electric socket. My body ignited from the inside out. My eyes blew out. And then I just sat down and cried and cried.’
They sat in silence for a while.
Terri put a hand on Robert’s arm and spoke to both of them.
‘We have several things Adam wants. He has things we want. We should use ours as bait. Draw him to a meeting.’
‘We want Katherine, and the Ma’rifat’ with its keys,’ Horace said. ‘We have some of the keys, the red gold, the core.’
‘And we have me, and the child I may yet carry,’ Terri answered. ‘His child.’
Robert shook his head. ‘We can offer the keys and core. That’s all. Not you.’
‘He needs me.’
‘He loves Katherine,’ Robert said. ‘He told me so.’
‘Katherine is not carrying his baby. He doesn’t need her.’
Robert’s mind flared again with the image of cell division. But it had begun on Friday. And still he saw the shadow.
‘Terri, I need to understand.’
‘It’s simple.’
Terri gathered her thoughts for a moment. Robert could feel her anger over Jay receding into the background as she focused on what she needed to tell them.
‘When the Blackout hit, chains of connection were made at a level we don’t ordinarily see, on a psycho-spiritual plane. We’ve talked about some of this.’
Adam and the maker of the Ma’rifat’ had become entangled, as they knew, in a parasitical relationship, she said. But there was more. Before fighting the maker of the Ma’rifat’, Adam had made love to Terri, as she had just told them. It had been heedless, spontaneous sex, with no protection. By the time the Blackout took place, a few hours later, she had been in the incipient stages of pregnancy. She had been carrying a fertilized egg.
‘At the same time, you and Katherine had been making love,’ Terri said to Robert. ‘She’d done what I suggested and called you up, and she’d used the sex-magick words to take the fear from them, to restore them to you both. They are words that summon up connection at the deepest levels.’
‘I remember,’ Robert said.
‘Katherine also got pregnant that day. When the Blackout happened, she was in the same condition as me. And a twofold connection formed. First, through Adam, I was joined to you and Katherine. The circle of Katherine– Robert–Adam joined the circle of Terri–Adam–Minotaur, with Adam as the link. And second, a more direct connection was created between Katherine and me, because of the blessing session I’d held with her earlier that morning. The words still connected us, and even her skin did, for I had touched her and was still in touch with her. Some of her DNA was on my skin, and I was resonating with her, just as I was with Adam.’
‘Adam talked about this. He said the Iwnw can work through DNA too. Resonating, setting up harmonics.’
Robert heard the screeching of the birds at the edges of his mind. There should have been harmony, but he couldn’t hear it.
‘I can set up harmonics too,’ Terri said. ‘They use it for evil, but it’s a particular gift of the Path of Tiresias too, which is the one I follow. Remember the caduceus, which in mythoriginated with Tiresias before being given to Hermes. The twin snakes along the shaft represent, among other things, the twin helixes of DNA and the ability to work with it.’
Robert protested: ‘No one understood DNA until the 1950s!’
Horace interrupted them. ‘In the sense of using machinery to examine DNA, tease it apart, manipulate it in dishes and so forth, you are correct that these marvels have only come to us in recent years,’ he said. ‘But the Ancients knew more than they are credited with. Some adepts of the Path have always been able to visualize DNA, resonate with eachperson throughit, even affect it psychically. It appears in the visions of shamans, in the mythology of snakes bearing wisdom.’
The squawking, screeching song of the birds in Robert’s mind grew louder and more discordant. Pulsing light throbbed behind his eyes. He tried to will it away.
‘The connection between you and Katherine. Go on.’
‘There was a connection between the potential lives too. Between the two eggs, both fertilized, neither yet implanted in the womb. And…’
Robert felt an unexpected wave of pain and shame flare from Terri. ‘I remember seeing a dance of fire,’ he said. ‘Burning figures of each of us. Flames and shadows. I saw you, me, Katherine and Adam. There was another man, Tariq. And a shadow I thought was Moss, or the possibility of him.’
‘For a moment the two eggs were connected, superimposed. Time and place elide. They shared the same space.’ She took Robert’s hand. ‘That was the moment, the moment of the Blackout, when the Iwnw connected with me through Adam. They got into the egg’s DNA, messed with the cell structure and turned it from life to death: cancer. And there was a transfer of light, of life force, between Katherine and me at the same time. My cancer absorbed most of the life from your future child,’ she said. ‘That’s why Katherine had a miscarriage a few months later. I’m so sorry. It just happened. There was no intention.’ She broke down in tears, sobbing wretchedly.
Robert thought his head would split apart. Cancer. And he had babbled to her about pregnancy, as if he were some kind of magus, some kind of visionary.
Part of him still could not believe the things he was learning. Terri was saying, in a way, that she’d killed Moss? No. The Iwnw had killed Moss.
‘Terri, there’s something I don’t understand. These events were over a year ago?’
‘A year and two weeks.’
‘I’ve seen shadows over you. Around you. Cell division. But only since Friday.’
‘They froze the cancer as soon as they created it. Or said they had. To mess with our heads and hold it over us as a threat.’
‘Why?’
‘To encourage Adam to obey them when they called on him. For a year, nothing happened. We even thought they might have been lying. And then they unfroze it five days ago. To reinforce the fact in his mind that I will die in a few days if he doesn’t ensure the detonation of the Ma’rifat’. They claim they will reverse the cancer and protect us from the blast if he does that.’
‘Do you believe them?’
‘Adam seems to.’
Even in the light of day, Robert felt shadows of night all around him. Evil creatures lurked there, baying and screaming. Yales like the ones on the gate of St John’s College. Gargoyle-like monsters of vicious intent. He saw even more clearly the level of evil he was preparing to fight. He swore he would do whatever it took, to his last breath.
‘Horace, did you know about this?’
Horace reached forward and took Terri’s hand. ‘Yes, I have known for some time. Adam and Terri asked me if I could help. I’m afraid it has been beyond my powers to do so. Even the Perfect Light cannot always undo what evil has done.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me? Can’t doctors do anything?’
‘I did not feel you were ready. And no, they cannot even detect the incipient cancer. Terri has been told by conventional medicine that it is all in her mind.’
‘I felt it resume the day after you and I were together,’ Terri said, wiping her eyes. ‘Then on Sunday I found Katherine at the apartment I was sharing with Adam. I always knew that if he took up with her again, he’d leave me. He wouldn’t be able to help himself. I felt I couldn’t count on him to protect me any more. I went to the only people who could help me, my witch friends at the Mischief House. They took me in.’
‘Were they able to help with the cancer?’
‘No. Robert, my highest hope is that I can help Adam hold on long enough for you to defeat the Iwnw and somehow save us. Adam, me, the child. All of us. You’re the only one who can.’
At that moment the Quad rang. It was Adam.
‘Hello, Robert, time for us to meet again. Bring your friends.’
Robert lost it. ‘If I ever see you again, it will be the last thing you ever do! Where’s my wife?’
Horace motioned for him to calm down and to put the call on speaker so they could all hear it. Robert ignored him.
‘Was that you up the top of Rockefeller Center, you fucker? Was that you who broke that guy’s neck? Feel like a big man?’
Terri snatched the phone from him and pressed the speaker button.
‘I know nothing about that,’ Adam said. ‘Last time I saw you was at Grand Central. You nearly killed me.’
‘I should have.’
‘You chose to do the opposite. I should express my gratitude.’
‘I thought I saw good in you, still. I guess I was wrong.’
Silence. Robert thought he heard Adam’s voice choke.
‘Regardless of that, we need to talk,’ Adam said. ‘Cleopatra’s Needle. The Central Park Obelisk. We need to trade.’
Horace nodded frantically for Robert to agree.
‘Perhaps. The core. I have it with me.’
‘And all the remaining keys?’
‘All the ones you don’t have, yes.’
‘I want Terri.’
‘No. The core, in exchange for Katherine.’
‘No deal. I’m done with Katherine, you can have her. But I get Terri and the core.’
‘Not a chance.’
‘Then goodbye.’
Terri shouted into the Quad: ‘Adam?’
‘Terri. We can still bring the baby back.’
‘You can have me. I’ll come. I want to be with you. And you can have the rest of what you want. Just give Katherine back to Robert.’
Silence. Then Adam’s voice: ‘Go there now. I’ll come when you are there.’
As they walked north along the tree-lined promenade of the Mall, Horace talked about the obelisk.
‘It’s a twin,’ Horace said. ‘They both stood at Heliopolis, which the ancient Egyptians called Iwnw, 3,500 years ago. A sacred city. Sacred to both the Perfect Light and our enemy, the Brotherhood, who take their name from it.’
Robert had not made the connection until now.
‘The missing twin is in London, where it is also known as Cleopatra’s Needle,’ Horace continued. ‘Though both were erected well before her time.’
‘Wait, Horace,’ Robert said. ‘You talk about myths all over the world echoing the battles between the Iwnw and the Perfect Light. Was this obelisk standing at Iwnw when this all began?’
‘No, it came much later. It was raised in what historians now call the New Kingdom. The history of the battle for control of the Pathgoes back much further, and not just to Ancient Egypt.’
‘Tell me. I want to understand.’
Horace reflected for a moment, then began. ‘The Path has existed for as long as there have been human beings. It is, simply, a way of seeing ourselves as we truly are – intimately connected to the rest of the universe, to a great consciousness that is the mind of the universe itself. All human beings are capable of ascending the Path and achieving full awareness of this, and in doing so experiencing how mind, matter and energy are all one, in constant transformation from one form to another.’
‘But you’ve said barely thirty people in the world know the secrets of red gold, for example,’ Robert objected.
‘All are capable,’ Horace said. ‘But few choose to walk the Path beyond its first steps. It is arduous in the extreme – even for those who are not undergoing the remarkable forced awakening that we have imposed upon you.’
Robert turned to Terri, who was walking with her arms held across her stomach, her staff tightly gripped in one hand.
‘You said you follow the Path of Tiresias. I am on the Path of Seth. How many are there?’
Terri said nothing, lost in her inner thoughts. He sensed she was praying for Adam.
‘There are as many ways to approach the Path as there are individual candidates,’ Horace replied. ‘But there are perhaps a dozen categories of similar approaches. That of Sethis reserved for very few.’
‘Do the Iwnw follow the same Path?’
‘They do. There is only one. But they inhabit its shadow side, and they seek to use the Path to wield power over others. They seek to rule. We do not. Once we were the same. We are all of the same kind. We all hear the higher harmonies, see the colours of soul states, can sometimes see beyond time and space. Everywhere in the world where the Path was known, however, there came a split. A scission. One was at Iwnw. But there were others. In China. In southern India. Among the Celts.’
Robert reflected on Horace’s words, trying to fit his own experiences on to the story he was hearing. The trials had shown him a shadow side to the Path’s powers. When he had been most strongly drawn to the shadows, the Iwnw had succeeded in infiltrating his consciousness.
‘The old men in business suits. The three white-haired men. Are they the Iwnw or just representatives? Priests?’
‘They are adepts who preferred to follow the shadow side of the Path, and who made themselves over to evil. They are the Iwnw in this world, a manifestation of the seething, hateful force that lives in the virtual world, yearning constantly to incarnate, seeking constant opportunity to seize on our fears, our anger, our pride.’
‘That’s what happened in the beginning? Some followers of the Path split away and sought earthly power?’
‘Everywhere it has been the same story,’ Horace said. ‘And constantly renewed. The powers of the Path are so great that it is very difficult to renounce self-advancement. One must cut away the ego entirely, which is like experiencing death.’
They walked past the Naumberg Bandshell and down the steps into an arched underground walkway. Once-glorious Minton encaustic tiles, in faded symmetrical patterns of reds, yellows and blues, lined the passage, which brought them up to the broad sky and expansive sweep of Bethesda Terrace, the angel silhouetted against the scudding clouds.
Still Robert had more questions. ‘What does the word “Iwnw” refer to, Horace?’
‘It means column, as you know, and refers to two things. First, to the creation of the world. The first island to emerge from the primeval sea of chaos was represented at Iwnw by a column, topped by a small pyramid shape.’
‘And what is the second thing?’
‘It refers to the Path. The column, in this sense, is the spinal column, linking our most primitive, raw nature at the bottom to our highest potential, our capacity for communion with all of creation, at the top. It represents our ascent when we follow the Path. The temples of Iwnw were places of great learning and spiritual attainment.’
‘You speak of the Path but not of God, Horace. I don’t think I’ve ever heard you speak of God.’
‘At the end of the Path – at the top of the column, which we may also visualize as a ladder, if that is easier – there is the experience of the divine,’ Horace said. ‘Some call it God and personalize it. Others experience only a teeming, endlessly pregnant void – the awareness of creation happening at every instant, everywhere. It is the same thing.’
They broke right and then north, past the Boat-house Café and through the Ramble to Turtle Pond, guarded by a fierce statue of the Polish independence hero King Jagiello, swords crossed above his head before battle.
The Romans had taken the obelisk from Heliopolis to Alexandria in 12 bc, Horace said as they walked. Then it wasn’t moved again till 1879, when it was prepared for shipment to New York after the local ruler gave it to America as a goodwill gift. To the great excitement of Freemasons at the time, items found under the pedestal when it was lifted in Alexandria included a stone carved in the form of a mason’s square; a trowel cemented to the limestone beneath, to show it had not been left there by accident; a stone of unusual whiteness; cubes finished, dressed or roughened in ways consistent with Masonic symbolism; and an aperture in one of the hidden stones in the shape of a diamond, taken to represent a gem known to Freemasons as the Master’s Jewel.
‘The Masons stumbled across the Path during the Crusades, when they were still calling themselves Templars,’ Horace said. ‘But most have retained little of the wisdom they once guarded.’
They continued north into thick trees and then suddenly, sooner than he had expected above them to the right, Robert caught a glimpse of the seventy-foot obelisk, gleaming white in the sun. They looped further north to the steps leading up to the octagonal platform on which it stood and went up.
‘Horace,’ Terri asked, ‘what does it say on the obelisk?’
Horace went to the south face. ‘My hieroglyphics are a little rusty, but I will read the main inscription, along the centre of the column. The outside ones on each side were added later by a subsequent pharaoh. He is the heavenly Horus, the powerful, glorious bull, beloved of Ra, the King of Upper and Lower Egypt. He made this monument for his father, Atum, Lord of Iwnw, erecting for him two great obelisks whose pyramidions are of fine gold. Iwnw… some illegible parts here… the son of Ra, Thutmose, may he live for ever. That would be Thutmose III, to be exact.’
Terri smiled. Horace looked up at the top of the obelisk. ‘Imagine the sun hitting the gold at the top, what that must have looked like. It must have been spectacular.’ He pointed downtown. ‘All obelisks, all towers, all skyscrapers are the same thing. They are our desire to touch the sky, to know our incorporeal nature. They are rockets of the mind, of the spirit. Fireworks that never burn out. They are the necessary partners to the sacred cave, the rock walls painted with our dreams, the ring around the hearth, the magic circle of stones. The lingam and the yoni. Straight line and curved.’
Robert saw an aura of grey-blue light around the monument. Concentrating, he found he could bring it in and out of focus, and reduce or enhance its intensity. The violence of his earlier visual and aural impressions had been fading imperceptibly since they’d reached the obelisk.
Terri sat down heavily on a bench. ‘Where the fuck is Adam?’
‘He will come when he is ready. I suspect he is attempting to build enoughstrengthto be able to mask some of his thoughts and actions, still, from the Iwnw, though perhaps it is too late to hope for that.’
‘No,’ Terri said. ‘It’s not too late.’ Now Terri stood up from her bench and paced in frustration. ‘Would you two just focus on nailing Adam when he gets here, please? Is there a way to do something to help him before I go with him?’
‘If Katherine is here, there may be a chance, while we still have the Malice Box. The major key,’ Horace said. ‘If he comes without the Iwnw. Without his minders. It may be that getting away from them is what’s taking him so long.’
‘ Tariq,’ Terri said.
‘The Minotaur, yes,’ Horace replied. ‘If he can somehow be released, or ejected, from Adam, the Iwnw’s link to Adam will be destroyed. It would also break the link to you, and their grip on your cell structure would be broken.’
‘What would it take?’
‘It may not be possible,’ Horace said. ‘But Katherine would have to try to talk to the man she betrayed right into hell.’
They discussed alternative plans while they waited, voices lowered, throwing up mental shields as well as they could against the ears of the Iwnw. Robert found himself doing it naturally, without thinking about it or even knowing just how he did it.
Yet still he felt nothing of the enlightenment, the wakened state, that he had expected to find at the end of the trials. All was confusion, a dark and inchoate mess.
They each sat a third of the way around the obelisk, in a Y, and settled into their own thoughts.
‘Robert, you recall the hidden aperture found under the obelisk,’ Horace said. ‘There was no actual jewel there, but its shape represented one. The jewel represented the purified consciousness of one who walks the Path all the way to the end. Focus on the jewel now. I suggest we all meditate on that for a while. It will help you to prepare for the coming ordeal. I fear Adam may keep us waiting for quite some time.’
Robert thought back to the black flint he had felt in his heart at Union Square after 9/11, when he’d been unable to believe that love alone could be enough to fight the hatred behind those attacks. Now he saw that love, and love alone, would be the only weapon with which he could defeat the Iwnw.
‘When I looked into the Malice Box,’ Robert said, ‘it seemed to flip back and forth between convex and concave, as if it were bothat once.’
‘Both and neither, simultaneously,’ Horace said. ‘Paradox is the language of the divine. In the same way, concentrate upon the absence of the jewel, until the jewel itself appears in your consciousness.’
Robert held the empty jewel-shaped aperture in his mind and let all else float away. Time stopped and rushed by at once, and neither seemed real. He stared deep into the empty niche, until he became it himself: an empty niche, an empty vessel, an aching void, which slowly began to flip back and forth between empty and full, absence and the jewel.
In search of himself, in search of understanding, Robert went in his mind to the place he had been happiest. Birdsong twittered and echoed all around him, rising into the leafy green heights of the copse in the grounds he had roamed as a child, the lands of the great house. Dappled green light played on his skin as he sat on the smooth stone, inviting the birdsong to permeate his senses as he played through in his mind all the mysteries of the world. He had never left there without a feeling of resolution. Now he lost himself in the melodious, carefree chirping of the language of the birds, and knew peace.
Someone was coming. A twig snapped under a heavy boot and a comforting presence entered the copse, his strong and slow stride that of an outdoorsman, a man of nature. Robert smelled wet earth, rain in the air, damp leaves. It was his father. With a nod he came to sit beside Robert on the stone.
They were silent, at ease in each other’s company, long used to the wordless ways they had of expressing their love. Grey-haired and ruddy, his hands gnarled but his great back strong from decades of work on the land, his father was as Robert remembered him best. Powerful and kind. Thoughtful, sparing of words.
‘You’ve always liked this place, eh?’
Robert nodded. He felt no need to speak.
‘I’ve fetched you away from here a few times. Your mother did too. Whenever we didn’t know where to find you, this is where we’d come.’
His deep brown eyes searched Robert’s, wanting to communicate something that words were unable to carry.
‘I’ve written a few things down for you,’ his father said, reaching into his pocket. He pulled out a letter and held it out to his son, his hand trembling slightly. ‘Things you should know, in case you ever need them.’
Robert reached out and took the letter. He recognized it as the one he had received at university, the one he had burned but still remembered in every word and syllable. Their eyes met, and Robert saw his father was troubled.
‘Your mother and I kept you away from these things,’ he said. ‘We knew of too muchdanger, too much wickedness that had come from messing with things we didn’t understand. Terrible things that happened, family stories… We decided you should be brought up differently, in a modern way. We wanted you to have opportunities we never had, that the old ways would never give you.’
Robert realized that his father was apologizing to him. He was seeking Robert’s blessing for keeping him in ignorance of his gift.
‘Don’t ever say I gave you this,’ the old man said. ‘And when you have children, make sure you don’t hold them back with your own fears.’
He held out his hand to Robert, man to man, and Robert took it, shaking it gently.
‘There’s nothing to be sorry for,’ he said to his father. ‘I wasn’t ready then. I am now. There’s nothing to forgive.’
His father rose, wordlessly, and gave a final nod of goodbye. He walked out of the copse, leaving Robert alone with the harmonies of the singing birds, clear and crystalline like a perfect shining jewel.
Robert opened his eyes. It was dark. Horace was nowhere to be seen. Terri was sitting with her weapon across her knees, alert, facing into the blackness.
‘Where have you been? It’s been hours,’ she said. ‘Welcome.’
‘Thank you,’ Robert replied.
He heard a cough from behind the obelisk. ‘Actually, old man, I think she’s talking to me.’
Adam stepped forward, followed by Katherine. Robert’s heart leaped, though she looked distraught, exhausted. Adam had Katherine’s pistol in his hand. He gestured with it as if it were a toy, then slipped it into his waistband.
‘I had to take this from Katherine. Useless little device among friends suchas ourselves, but still better in my hands. Sit still, Robert. Tearful reunions can wait for a minute or two longer.’
Adam looked like a ghost, gaunt and deathly pale. He surveyed the area suspiciously. ‘Horace, come out, wherever you are. I can feel you.’
There was no reply. Adam seemed to weigh his options, then reach a decision to go on. ‘Katherine, sit over there.’ He gestured to the bench where Terri sat. Robert felt Katherine was focused entirely on Adam and was sending him every last drop of strength she could muster.
‘Robert, now you too, please. Between the ladies.’
Robert slowly got up and moved to the other bench. Katherine met his eyes with an expression of burning anger and fear. He tried to beam back at her his determination to protect her, to protect them all.
‘What complicated webs we weave,’ Adam said, with an air of sadistic glee. He threw something at Robert’s feet. ‘Rickles, don’t say I don’t look out for you.’
It was his wedding ring.
Robert looked at Terri, then at Katherine. Neither acknowledged him. He slowly bent down and picked it up, but did not replace it on his finger. He slipped it into a pocket.
‘I’ll leave you to work out how exactly the reconciliation goes down,’ Adam said. ‘I asked Terri to steal it during your tryst, to help you along with the breaking-down part of the trials. It’s a brutal business, to be sure.’
Adam seemed to have lost the last of his humanity, retaining only an air of bitter, defeated amusement.
‘Now, in exchange, give me the core, and the remaining keys you possess. Right now.’ Robert stood slowly up and took a bag containing the keys from his trouser pocket: the seventh and one part each from the fifth and the sixth.
‘Put the bag down there on the ground.’ He pointed to a spot between them. Robert stepped forward and put it down.
‘Step back.’
Adam carefully bent and picked it up, keeping his eyes on Robert and the women behind him.
‘Now the core. The major key, the one that makes it all work. The little Malice Box that fits into the big Malice Box.’
Terri stood up, setting aside her staff, and walked towards Adam. Then she took his hands. ‘Tell us something first.’
The tension racking Adam’s body seemed to soften slightly, and he raised a hand to Terri’s face. ‘Oh, God, Terri. What?’
‘Tell us about Lawrence. And about the Iwnw. What they want.’
Horace appeared out of the darkness behind Adam. ‘What about Lawrence, Adam?’
Adam jumped, taken by surprise. Still Terri held his hands.
‘Tell it,’ Terri insisted. ‘Horace needs to hear it. Everyone needs to hear what they made you do. What you’ve had to bear. Please.’
Adam stared at her, reluctant to begin. ‘It’s not a pleasant story,’ he said.
‘Please, Adam.’
He relented, shrugging. ‘As you wish.’
Terri released his hands and stepped back a few paces.
‘Horace will have told you,’ Adam began, ‘that Lawrence died a soldier. That under unbearable pressure from me, acting for the Iwnw, he refused to talk, and eventually managed to grab the pistol in his office and shoot himself, rather than divulge the whereabouts of the hidden stocks of red gold.’
‘That is what happened, I’m sure of it,’ Horace said. Robert had never heard such frost in his voice.
Adam grimaced. ‘That isn’t entirely true, I’m afraid to say. On the heroic side, he managed to make a phone call to Robert here to try to tip him off. A shame that he was barely able to speak, in his pain. I called you right afterwards, Robert, to muddy the waters. I was entirely in the grip of the Iwnw, as you will have gathered. Hard to believe it was just a week ago tonight.’
Terri blinked back tears of rage, refusing to cry.
‘The fact of the matter, I regret to say, is that Lawrence cracked before he died. He whimpered and wept, and he let slip a clue – a small one, admittedly, but sufficient – about the whereabouts of the red gold. Then I let him write his goodbye note and shoot himself to end his misery.’
They all stared at Adam in shock as a ghastly expression of shame mingled with pride crept across his features.
Horace stared at Adam with contempt and outrage. ‘By all that is most holy,’ Horace whispered, ‘if this is true, may these actions turn back upon the Iwnw a hundredfold, whether I or another be the instrument thereof. I forgive them, as my oath requires, but I do not absolve them of the consequences of their actions.’
As he spoke, words formed in Robert’s mind. Remember the letter. Seek Lawrence’s message. Remember the letter.
Adam stared now at Robert. ‘It is very strange to realize, as I did just a few hours ago, how the Path works through us to express itself once we begin to walk it. I was remembering the Unicorn challenge at Cambridge, and I realized that the decryption keys I gave the contestants, when placed one on top of another, made a reasonable sketch of the shape of the Tree of Life. I’d had no idea. Horace had barely begun to initiate me into its use as a tool on the Path at that time, and yet there it was speaking through me, forcing itself into the world.’
Robert met his eyes, wondering whether even now, despite everything, Adam was still trying to pass him secret information. What aspect of the Unicorn game was he talking about? He tried to calm his mind and hear the words forming at its fringes. But he couldn’t grasp them.
‘Returning to Lawrence,’ Adam suddenly said. ‘He with stood enormous pain. The Iwnw tormented him through me. Physical pain, and mental. When I couldn’t beat it out of him, they came in with their own weapons. Torture of the psyche. Nightmares from the depths of childhood, secret fears dredged up from the dungeons of the mind. And he cracked. He talked, at least a little. He led me to understand that the red gold had been melted down, in minute amounts, into regular gold bars from the Hencott mines. Hidden in plain sight, in a way.’
Robert saw Horace’s face fall.
‘And those ingots were mostly stored at the place where everyone else stores their gold, naturally enough,’ Adam continued. ‘One of the safest places in the world. At the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, in downtown Manhattan.’
The Iwnw, who for a year, since the last detonation, had been patiently trying to locate the rest of the red gold, now knew where a good proportion of it was to be found.
‘They had been seeking it because, not to put too fine a point on it, they were disappointed at the scale of the original explosion foreseen by the maker of the Ma’rifat’. Even if his weapon had fully exploded, instead of turning into the damp squib it became, it would have been something like Hiroshima, even though it used raw psychic energies as its fuel.
‘But now they want more, much more. That is why they sought the amplifying power of the red gold. They don’t want just physical destruction and passive victims. They want people to take death into their own hands. Internecine warfare. Brother against brother, family against family. Concentration camps across the land. Massacres with any weapon that comes to hand. It would not just be a physical bomb. It would be a soul bomb. It would rot the psyche of all those within its radius of destruction. Many millions of people. That is who they are. That is what they want.’
Adam looked at them defiantly. ‘They have eaten me away from the inside to make me help them, and I have resisted as long as possible. But there is a cancer invading Terri where a child should be. And still I hope that at the end of all this, our child may be returned to her. They have promised to keep us safe, and to reverse the cancer curse placed on her.’
Robert felt Adam had now lost all reason. ‘You believe them, Adam?’
‘I must.’
Katherine stared at Terri, then stood and slowly reached her hands to the younger woman’s belly. Terri put her hands over Katherine’s and held them in place. Adam looked away from them, directing himself to Robert.
‘Satisfied? As you can now see, I’ve had little choice in all this, try as I might,’ Adam said. ‘I may yet achieve at least one good thing. Now, the core. Please.’
‘I have it,’ said Horace. He slowly removed it from a jacket pocket. Robert could see its energy coursing through Horace’s arm. Horace kept his gaze deliberately on Adam’s eyes.
‘Same thing, put it down on the ground,’ Adam said.
But instead Horace called out to Katherine: ‘Speak to Tariq, Kat.’
She looked at him in astonishment. ‘What?’
‘Talk to Tariq. Now.’
Adam seemed disconcerted, stepping back as Katherine walked towards him, appearing to understand what was being asked of her.
‘Tariq, can you hear me?’
Horace drew closer to Adam, and then Terri approached Robert. At Horace’s shout, Robert and Terri joined hands with Horace and formed a ring around Adam. They all projected their most intense power into the centre of the ring, seeking to drive the Minotaur to the surface of Adam’s consciousness. Adam stood bolt upright, his head suddenly snapping back, every muscle knotted.
Standing outside the circle, Katherine weighed her words, choosing eachone with enormous care. ‘I let you down,’ she said. ‘I want you to know that I am ashamed of what I did. I betrayed you.’
Adam shuddered, saying nothing, lowering his head to lock his eyes on Katherine’s. Deep torment raged in his gaze. Pain and exhaustion.
‘I know that you have suffered greatly. Tariq, no one should have to go through what you have experienced. Your father arrested and mistreated. One intelligence service after another trying to use you, squeeze you, manipulate you for their purposes. Blackmail. Threats. And, through all of it, you struggled to do the right thing. To live as honourably as possible among the shameless. All these things I know and recognize. You did not deserve them. You did the best you could.’
Slowly, in the air around Adam’s head, a tenuous shape began to turn and spin, a shadow staring out at them from a place of torment deep within Adam’s own soul.
‘Quickly,’ Horace hissed. ‘Hurry!’
Robert felt the beginnings of a single, pure note sounding at the centre of his mind, in the place where the birds sang with unfettered joy.
‘Tariq, I know what the interrogators can do,’ Katherine said. ‘They broke you down because they can break anyone down. Nobody can resist suchtreatment. There is no shame. No shame at all for you. There is shame only for me.’
The shape around Adam’s head twisted and turned, giving off bolts of anguish and loss that hit Robert like punches in the gut. Robert tightened his grip on the hands of Terri and Horace as he saw the eye of death coalesce out of the air around Adam, flaring yellow and blue, achingly beautiful, staring at them all.
Katherine spoke into the eye. ‘You were a powerful man, a powerful being, stronger than I, but you have become weak, a parasite. It is not worthy of your kind soul. You were a brave man, and you can be brave again. I know you built the Ma’rifat’ with me in your mind at every moment. I know you wanted me to see how badly hurt and betrayed you had been, how humiliated you felt by me, how dreadfully I had scarred you. I know how you took the little ditties and songs we used to make up and turned them into clues to the location of the keys. I know you hid things in such a way that I might be able to find them. I know you did these things, in a way, to ensure that there was a flaw in your plan, a possibility that you might be stopped, a chance for me to rescue you from what you were planning to do. And that chance is now.’
Katherine fell on her knees, staring into the eye. ‘Can you forgive me? Please forgive me. I beg you to forgive me, as I forgive you.’
For a split second, the eye flared an opalescent white, anger and fear battling with other possibilities, with ghosts of other outcomes. Robert felt a tidal wave of sadness, of grief. But then Adam filled his lungs and bellowed, at the top of his voice: ‘NO!’
He flung off his paralysis with a sudden frantic twist and broke through their circle of hands, sending them all flying backwards to the ground. Adam lurched towards Katherine, who screamed at him and burst into sobbing, desperate tears. Adam loomed over her, hands reaching out in uncertainty as though to cherish her, to hold her in a lover’s embrace.
Horace called out: ‘Adam, leave her alone!’
Too late, Robert saw Adam turn and lunge at Horace, flinging him through the air. The old man slammed into the bench, hitting his head and falling in a tangled heap. Adam leaped upon him again and seized the Malice Box.
Terri ran to Horace as Adam turned to face Robert and Katherine. Katherine placed herself four-square before him, arms by her sides, defying him to pass her.
Adam gave a roar of anger. ‘Too late! Too late!’ He turned and wheeled his hands in the air, holding the core, then flung a sheet of raging light into their faces.
Dawn was breaking when Robert came to. He rolled upright and tried to stand. Every corner of his body lit up with pain.
Horace sat on one of the benches, eyes closed, in a posture of meditation. Robert could feel the old man was badly injured. Yet he emanated peace.
The early half-light bathed the park in gold. He could feel it on his skin, like warm, gentle rain. Robert shivered.
Terri was gone, and Katherine was still unconscious where she had fallen, near the foot of the obelisk. He went over to her and knelt stiffly by her side, placing his hand on her forehead. Without knowing how, he understood she was not harmed. He stroked her hair.
‘My darling. I’m so sorry.’
Horace spoke from behind him. ‘No need to be sorry, Robert. To go further we have had to come to this place.’
‘I can still save Adam,’ Robert said. ‘That wasn’t him.’
Horace grunted. ‘Look to your wife. Then we must talk. We must stop this thing.’
‘You’re hurt, Horace.’
‘Look to Katherine.’
Horace fished a map of Manhattan from his pocket and began to study it intently. It was the one he had taken from Robert at Grand Central, marked with the lines of the sacred shape he had traced on to the city during the trials.
Robert took off his jacket and knelt down again over Katherine, placing it gently under her head. He took her right hand and held it between his, kissing the rings on her fingers. After a few minutes, Katherine’s eyelids quivered. She came to and looked about her in a sudden panic. ‘I tried to save him! I tried! Horace? Terri?’
She attempted to stand. Robert restrained her with a touch of his hand.
‘You tried your best, darling. They were too strong. Rest for a moment.’
‘Is Horace OK? We have to stop them! Make it right!’
‘We will. We will.’
Horace waved the map. ‘The caches. The sites. The riddles. Pay attention. We have very little time now. They were all for something. Something more than simply reaching the next stage of the trials, I mean. They all resonate, and they all combine together. To give…’ He winced with pain as he got up to show them.
‘Horace, sit still.’
Katherine grabbed Robert around the neck and hauled herself to her feet. He half carried her over to Horace, and they sat down on either side of him.
‘These are the sites of the caches.’
Horace pointed to the circles and lines he’d drawn up and down the map. ‘You must understand how everything connects. Would you please pass me Terri’s weapon? Quickly.’
Robert retrieved the length of steel pipe from under the bench where it had fallen and handed it to Horace.
‘Now, please help me stand.’
Horace trod painfully forward, using the tube as a walking stick, then steadied himself and began to trace lines with it on the ground. As he drew, the lines began to glow faintly in the twilight.
‘This is Manhattan,’ he said, his voice harsh with pain. He traced an outline of the island, including the rectangular box of Central Park. ‘A powerful current of power – we might call it a ley line, or a stream of earth energy – runs the length of the island.’
He drew a vertical line down the centre of Manhattan.
‘Most people are not consciously aware of it, though unconsciously it has forced its way into the design and the life of the city in different ways. It has become the city’s central spine. Fifth Avenue broadly follows its path. No fewer than three obelisks are located along its course, as you yourself have seen, Robert, as well as the great skyscraper of Rockefeller Center.’
He drew a circle near the bottom of the island, at the location of St Paul’s Chapel, then another at the site of the Worth Monument, and a third where they were now in Central Park. All three were on the ley line. He traced a fourth circle to represent Rockefeller Center, just south of Central Park.
‘I think I saw that,’ Robert said. ‘I felt that pattern as I was completing the trials. But there was more to it. There was –’
Horace held up his hand. ‘One thing at a time. When the maker of the Ma’rifat’ was looking for a way to maximize the effect of his device, he clearly decided to use this ley line to link two devices, rather than using just one. By doing so, he could ensure that the destructive force was spread over a wide area, rather than just propagating from one point. And so he took the keys from one of the devices and hid them in a particular array along the island, around this central line of power, as a kind of antenna to transmit the force.’
He drew circles to show the location of each of the caches.
‘The array he chose is known as the Tree of Life. It has other names, but that is the most common one. He would have chosen it because it has been used, since time immemorial, to help human beings handle psycho-spiritual energies. It appears in ancient Egypt, in the Kabbalah of Jewishmysticism, in the Sufi strand of Islam, always as a key that unlocks such powers. It is an image of the Path.’
‘How is it used?’
‘It may be used in many ways. It consists of ten circles, or spheres, joined by a total of twenty-two paths. Some use it as a meditation aid, like a mandala, visualizing journeys along the Tree’s paths from one sphere to another. Each sphere, in this form of use, represents a different facet of human consciousness, from the purely sensory and physical at the bottom, to the ineffable mysteries of the divine at the top. Others give astrological value to the spheres, or link them to animals, stones and medicinal plants. Not in this case. Our man did not use all the paths, nor all the facets, of the pattern.
‘Rather, he reversed a tradition in which the Tree represents creation – with the inconceivably powerful divine light at the top, descending like a lightning bolt down through the other spheres, to attain physical reality in the lowest one. His intention was to use the shadow side of the tree, wreaking destruction instead of creation. A bolt of dark lightning, if you will.’
‘But that went wrong when Adam killed Tariq,’ Robert said. ‘He never got to position one of the devices.’
‘That’s correct. It would have been the last piece of the puzzle. All the rest was in place. But Adam forced the Ma’rifat’ to misfire when it was still several miles away from Manhattan.’
‘So the keys were left where they were, and the other device… Where is the remaining Ma’rifat’?’
As they spoke, Katherine suddenly saw in her mind, with total clarity, the cube that constituted the fourth key of the Ma’rifat’, the one she had stolen from the safe in the bedroom. A cube of 125 smaller cubes, eachstamped with a number. The larger cube sliced into five slabs of twenty-five cubes.
She closed her eyes and ran its numbers through her mind. She imagined herself in a hotel, a cube-shaped hotel where each room had a different number.
Up, down and across, eachstring of five numbers added up to 315.
The very central room, at the core of the hotel, was unnumbered. That would have to be the central mystery, the key thing Tariq had wanted to hide. Yet he’d been unable to avoid playing.
She ran through the numbers of the waypoints. The first ones had been 025, 064, X62, 101. It was an interior diagonal of the cube. Top left to bottom right.
She knew she’d cracked it at that moment.
The next four waypoints had been 036, 057, X69, 090. Another interior diagonal. Bottom left to top right.
She ran through the rest. They all passed through the central unnamed cube. In eachcase, the X represented that same cube.
All the strings of five cubes added up to 315.
So the centre cube, the unnamed mystery, had to be… 63.
And, she saw, that would have to be the waypoint for the location of the Ma’rifat’.
Tariq’s deepest secret.
She breathed hard.
‘Robert, give me the Quad,’ Katherine said.
She fired up the GPS programme and looked for Waypoint 063 in the directory, but it wasn’t there. No waypoint with that number was listed. Somehow Tariq must have hidden it. She called up a blank Go to Waypoint_____ prompt and punched in the numbers manually. 063. And suddenly there it was. ‘Downtown! The remaining device is downtown! Near where you started the trials. It’s not showing exactly where, and there’s no accompanying clue to go with it, but it’s in the area of St Paul’s.’
Horace looked at her with amazement. ‘I had reached a similar conclusion. It would have to be reasonably near the red gold hidden at the Fed, in order to be able to draw upon its magnifying power. How did you work it out?’
‘Tariq hid something at the centre of all the waypoint data. It was a number suggested by all the other waypoint numbers, based on the fourth key, that magic cube covered in numbers. I don’t think our effort to contact the Minotaur was in vain after all. I think I reached Tariq long enough for him to drop it into my mind, somehow.’
Robert stood and stared at the map Horace had drawn, impatience ripping through his body. He wanted to move, to attack. The cacophony in his head was giving way to a greater and greater sense of single purpose and power. He pointed to the island’s southern tip. ‘If we know it’s down there, why aren’t we already on our way to stop it?’
‘Because if you go now, you will be killed. You need to understand one or two more things. Then it will be time. Very soon.’
‘What things?’
‘Firstly, the trials. I arranged their sequence, chose their content, so that you would follow the same pattern through Manhattan that the maker of the Ma’rifat’ had laid out for its destruction – the Tree of Life, except in reverse. By tapping the powers unleashed by each trial, you would be dispelling the shadows from each level of the tree. Reclaiming the pattern for the good. And building the power necessary to erase it completely, at the end, by defeating the Iwnw and halting the detonation.’
‘I walked the Tree of Life, bottom to top.’
‘Yes, you walked its key levels, eachone corresponding to a trial. The trials were to prepare you for a final ordeal, the fight of your life, within the next hour. Only the worthy may enter the arena. To make it clearer, Robert, please come and lie down on top of the map.’
‘What?’
Horace’s voice rose with impatience, aching with pain. ‘Just do what I say! We are almost out of time.’
Robert bowed his head in apology and lay down on top of the map, his face to the sky.
‘With the top of your head at Rockefeller Center, it will help you understand, and it will then allow me to perform a ritual of power.’
Robert felt a deep surge of energy rippling into his body from the ground.
‘First, Trial by Earth. You were nearly killed on the very first day, were you not? Had to fight for your physical survival. Sinking your fingers into the earth of graves. Looking out over Ground Zero. Thinking about how we respond to being attacked. Responding to death. Then, the great tidal power of sexuality: Trial by Water. You’ll note that Mercer Street corresponds to the area of your groin. Then egotism, autonomy, self-esteem and self-centredness: Trial by Fire. You refused to be blackmailed, threw Adam’s attempt to control you back in his face. Guts.’
‘Then I went to Union Square.’
‘The place of the spiritual heart. The meeting place of the physical and spiritual selves. In the Judaic tradition, it is called Tiferet, meaning beauty, or Rahamim, meaning compassion. In mystical Islam, it is called Qalb, meaning heart. You’ll see it corresponds to your actual heart.’
‘Of course. All true soul work in all traditions leads to this place. In the fourth level you begin to transcend the ego, selfishness, begin to live more fully for others rather than yourself. You can only transcend a healthy ego, naturally. A sick ego prevents you from getting there. It sucks everything in. Union Square was the Trial by Air.’
‘Why air?’
‘The least substantial of the first four elements. The one most likely to fly away on its own unless it is tethered to the earth by the others. Compassion alone is nothing unless it is earthed in action. Feeling sorry for the little boy would not have saved him. Only leaping into the forest of boots and legs and shielding him with your own body saved his life.’
‘Then?’
‘Level five. Trial by Ether, meaning an element even more insubstantial than air, yet pervading everything, like an energy field. It stands for the interconnectedness of all things. It is the place of expression, creativity, situated at the level of your throat, the place where you speak your truth. It is reached only through a dynamic balance of the first four elements. This is where you begin to discover to what extent you may actually create the world around you. It is where you learn the true meaning of intention, which is the combination of your will and your ability to create. It is the state sought by the ancient alchemists, a level of perception where you see how consciousness and matter are two sides of the same coin. It is how you stopped the bomb.’
‘The sixth level. Trial by Mind, the level of insight and understanding. Inner vision. The third eye, the vestigial eye that is the pineal gland. The New York Public Library is at the level of your forehead, and it is where you encountered the blind visionary Borges. This is where you acquire the power to heal. It was also at this level that you received the wound to your head. You saved yourself from Katherine’s shot when I was not able to protect you.’
‘It was the only time the Iwnw reached me,’ Katherine said. ‘Robert, I’m so sorry. I truly thought for a moment I’d killed you.’
Robert didn’t reply, his mind far away in the sky.
‘Then Trial by Spirit. The seven-pointed star stands for esoteric knowledge, Gnosis, learning what is secret or hidden. Perhaps that’s why many police forces use it for their badges, quaintly enough. It is at the crown of your head, as is Rockefeller Center.’
Robert brought himself back to earth. ‘So the city and my body and the trials are all, in a sense, now one. How do we use this, Horace?’
‘By going directly back down the Tree of Life to fight the Iwnw. You will now be able to tap into the raw power of the ley line that runs down its core, down the middle column of the Tree. And you will have your own fully awakened powers, drawing on the forces of earth, water, fire, air, ether, mind and spirit.’
Robert understood. He had been torn apart in the trials, his former identity stripped down and destroyed. And in its place he could now feel the fullness of a new self growing from the ruins of his former fear-bound, sleepwalking persona. He could feel light bursting from within him as his new body was stitched together, connected to his full powers within, connected to the full world without, the gravity of the earth and the boundless love of the heavens.
‘Now for the ritual of power.’
Horace intoned the words with the greatest solemnity: ‘We have walked the Path of Seth. We have dismembered this man, and now we rebuild his sundered body in the light of renewal. Where shall we find a head?’
Robert replied: ‘I saw the same head twice, on the first trial and the third. The head of the Green Man, vegetation springing from his face.’
‘Renewal,’ Horace said, using the metal staff to paint a figurative head over Robert’s. ‘Where shall we find arms?’
‘The fifth trial, and the sixth. The severed arm holding the sword at the Worth Monument, and the arm holding the hammer at the General Society where we met Terri.’
Horace traced new arms over Robert’s supine form. With each addition to his body of light, Horace drew the corresponding form in the air above him.
‘Strike with righteous power. Where shall we find a heart?’
‘The fourth trial. Union Square. The four conjoined hearts I found that made up a compass rose. Katherine, me, Adam, Terri.’
‘Compassion. Where shall we find legs?’
‘The first trial. Legs of gold.’
‘May they carry you to your quarry. Where shall we find a spine?’
‘Trials six and seven. The caduceus carved into the steps at the New York Public Library, and the one carried by Hermes at Rockefeller Center. The magic wand of Hermes, and of Tiresias, represents the spine, from the earthly powers at its base to the divine powers at its summit. It therefore also represents the Path.’
‘With this spine may you stand, and never fall again. This caduceus represents also the central column of the Tree of Life drawn on this city. Through it flow the power of the ley line and the power of the awakened Robert Reckliss, twin snakes of the physical and spiritual selves. Where shall we find, finally, a skin of light?’
‘The first trial again. The Man of Swirling Light. The angel of the seven seals.’
Horace painted swirling whorls of light over Robert’s body.
‘You have now unsealed the seven secrets. The son of the dismembered man is born, and he is the old man reborn of himself, made new in the light of the Path. With what will you fight the Brotherhood of Iwnw, those who dispute the ownership of the Path?’
Robert stood up, feeling power blazing from his body. He took the staff from Horace. ‘With love. With love, and the staff of Hermes.’
‘What do you hear?’
‘The purest birdsong.’
‘You have come through the darkest night, and you have completed the Trial by Spirit.’
Katherine stared at him, tears in her eyes. He took her hand and kissed it.
‘Look what it nearly cost me.’
‘I love you, Robert.’
‘I love you, darling.’
Robert turned to Horace. ‘What more do we need to know before we go?’
‘You may now learn a sacred secret. In the preparation of materials suchas red gold, and the metallic glass known as the Philosopher’s Stone, certain words of power are used. When pronounced in the correct order, by an adept in a state of high spiritual attainment, they will confer mastery over the materials.’
‘What are they?’
‘I don’t know. But you do.’
‘What are you talking about? I don’t know any words of power.’
‘You know them because you have heard them at some point in your contact with the Path. When you need them, you will remember them. You must.’
‘There were some words like that in the Newton document that Adam swore to protect,’ Katherine said. ‘But half of them were scratched out. Adam never told me what they were.’
‘The other half will come to you when you need it. Those are the words of power for the Stone, the vitreous metal.’
‘What about the red gold? You must have known the words for that.’
‘Lawrence and I each knew half, and I can share my words with you. They are quaero arcana mundi: “I seek the secrets of the world.” But I was not permitted to know Lawrence’s words, and I have found no record of them since his death, alas.’
Katherine shrieked in frustration: ‘How can Robert possibly know them, then?’
‘Lawrence would almost certainly have tried to communicate them before he died. If so, you will remember in time. Trust the Path.’
Katherine and Robert helped Horace to one of the benches, where he sat down with a gasp of pain.
Robert asked his final questions: ‘Any idea what this final waypoint looks like? What we are looking for?’
Horace pointed to the obelisk looming above them. ‘Not to put too fine a point on it, we are at the masculine end of the polarity. You must go to the opposing end, to an intensely female space.’
‘Female? How?’
‘I don’t know exactly. I have been searching for any psychic echo or impressions of this place for some time. It is well shielded. All I have been able to see is that there is a female space near where you started. You must find it. Curved. Rounded. Hidden.’
‘Adam took all the triggers for the Ma’rifat’. Why doesn’t he just detonate it as soon as he gets there?’
‘He could. But the explosion would be smaller than the Iwnw desire. He needs you there to give it the full force of a soul bomb, but you are also the only one who can stop it. It’s a risk they are willing to take.’
‘But –’
‘It will explode today, within the hour, unless you disarm it, it is true. But to achieve the greater conflagration his masters require, he needs your power. The power we have refined and built in you over the last week. The power to defeat him, which can also be twisted to help him. To achieve what they wish, they need a Unicorn. More precisely, they need the sacrifice of a Unicorn.’
‘I’m ready,’ said Katherine. ‘Let’s go.’
‘Children, remember everything Adam has told you. Remember all his games. Even without his knowing, they may together make a key. A code. A metaphor. They may yet save your lives. They may yet save your souls.’
Horace closed his eyes for a moment. Robert felt pain flaring from him.
‘Robert, my child. The Path has led you to its summit. To love, to selflessness, to the divine spark within. To God, if you care for the term. And in this case, to single combat. A fight to the death. No quarter. You must prevail.’
Robert looked into the eyes of his old friend. ‘Thank you, Horace.’
‘Now go, my friends. I cannot leave here. I am too injured to go on. I am growing weak. I will work to shield you.’
Katherine took Horace by the hand. ‘Do you need a doctor? Can we do anything?’
Horace patted her hand and smiled.
‘The care I need cannot be obtained in a medical hospital, my dear girl. I have always been protected. Dear Lawrence gave his life to protect me and Robert. Now it is my turn to do the protecting. Godspeed. Go.’
Katherine and Robert ran east through the park, through Greywacke Arch, to Fifth Avenue. The first vehicle they saw was a white stretch limousine bedecked in white ribbons, making its way home from what looked like wedding duty. Katherine frantically flagged it down.
‘Can you take us downtown? It’s an emergency. Quickly? Here’s money.’ She pushed a handful of twenty-dollar bills at the driver through the lowered passenger-side window.
‘There’s been a party in the back,’ the driver said, taking the cash. ‘It was a crazy wedding. I don’t think there’s anyone left back there, but you might want to check. Bridesmaids. Groom’s friends. Wild kids wanting to go all night. I think I just dropped the last ones off.’
Robert and Katherine climbed in. Empty bottles rolled around on the floor amid discarded party hats, pizza boxes and strands of dried silly string. The seats were sprinkled with sequins and flower petals.
‘Just like our wedding,’ Katherine said. ‘Take us straight down Fifth Avenue, then straight down Broadway, to Maiden Lane. Fast.’
‘Yes, ma’am. Do you want some privacy?’
‘Yes.’
The driver pressed a switch and raised the partition behind him. Then he gunned the engine, jolting Katherine and Robert back in their seats.
They tore past isolated bands of early-morning tourists, Republican delegates out for a jog, the occasional lost protester. They passed Rockefeller Center, the New York Public Library, the Empire State Building.
Robert tried to go over the phone call from Lawrence, and his suicide note, looking for messages. Then he tried Adam’s games, and the play…
Katherine closed her eyes and dropped into a deep meditation, her breathing shifting to a profound, regular rhythm. The fear and anger that had surrounded her in a dark aura the previous night were gone, and Robert could feel her rebounding in confidence and determination.
He gazed out the window at the souvenir stores. Tiny toy Empire States, Chryslers, World Trade Centers… he understood his sickness now. He had actually been getting well. He had been perceiving the trials to come, the mystery of the sacred pattern threading through the streets of Manhattan, even before his awakening. And there was something more. Some buildings were directly affecting his senses, singing to him in harmonies he’d never heard before.
As they passed 29th Street, a building leaped out at him from the left like an oncoming train. Number 261. Burgundy, blue and gold. Hexagons and cubes and ziggurats hit him straight between the eyes. He gasped, looking away. He was still getting used to the intensity of his amplified perception. And intuitively he now understood it. Some buildings were dead, hitting him just with flat coldness. Others were jacking straight into his central nervous system. The buildings most affecting him were in various styles of Art Deco, the ones that borrowed motifs and proportions from ancient sacred buildings: towering monumental gateways, zigzag thunderbolt forms, steepling vertical facades from Egyptian and Central American temples. He felt them as physical expressions of the Path he had followed, as though his experiences had been sculpted and frozen in time for all to see. He saw new harmonies of proportion, colour and space, and he realized that the Path had been encoded into sacred architecture many thousands of years ago.
His whole soul was singing. He could feel Katherine in new ways, her presence next to him vibrant, magical. He reached out and took her hand, and she gripped it tightly as he looked into her eyes.
‘Kat, I’m sorry I was unfaithful to you. I truly am. And I’m especially sorry for some of the things I said when we argued over it. About wanting to do it again. About –’
She put a finger to his lips. ‘If you hadn’t, none of us would be alive now. I understand what had to happen.’ She took both his hands in hers. ‘I am still very angry with Horace and Adam for not being able to think of a better way to get you through the second trial. It could have been handled differently. I feel sorry for Terri with her cancer. And I’m sorry too for some things I’ve said in the last nine months. For the coldness between us. For the distance, since I lost the baby.’
‘It wasn’t your fault we lost Moss.’
‘I felt it was. Now I know better.’
He reached into his pocket and took out his wedding band. ‘Would you put this back on for me, please?’
She looked into his eyes, searching into the deepest recesses of his heart. For a moment, even as he opened himself fully to her gaze, he feared she would refuse. Then she slid the ring on to his finger. They shared a long kiss, and then Katherine half turned so she could lean back into him, his arms around her. They gazed in silence at the passing buildings of Broadway, each preparing for the danger that was to come.
‘We’re just about there,’ the driver said over the limousine’s intercom. ‘Maiden Lane. A pleasure to drive you this morning.’
The limousine drew to a halt and they got out. The sky was pulsing white now to Robert’s eyes. He tried to feel out with his mind towards Adam, towards Terri, but found nothing.
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York was across the street, just a couple of blocks east of Broadway. There was more gold there than anywhere in the world, even Fort Knox. Robert had visited its underground vaults, cut into the bedrock of Manhattan, and seen the ingots stacked there in unmarked cages. Now it housed enough red gold to help the Iwnw kill millions of people.
Could that be where the Ma’rifat’ was located? It would be impossible to breach, he thought. And he had no recollection of the underground spaces being curved or arched.
He took out the Quad and tried to locate Waypoint 63, but nonsensical data filled the GPS display screen. The directional arrow swung wildly.
‘Kat, are you getting any impression of Adam, or Terri? Or the Iwnw?’
‘Nothing.’
But at the corner of Maiden Lane, just as they were about to head towards the Fed, Katherine stopped dead in her tracks outside a jeweller’s. Robert saw a wraith of yellow light reflected in the shop window. Then it moved to surround Katherine. She breathed in sharply, her whole posture changing.
‘Time and space beneathmy feet,’ she said. Except it wasn’t her voice.
‘Terri?’
There was a clock set into the sidewalk under Katherine’s feet, surrounded by a brass ring marked with compass points for north, south, east and west.
‘I see where you are. Look north. Look for the four elements.’
‘Where are you?’
‘Downtown. Hidden away. Underground. Pain.’
‘We’re coming to get you, Terri. Where did he go?’
She gave a sudden shriek. ‘Iwnw are here. Burning! Oh, God, burning! Come quickly!’
Then she was gone. Katherine slumped, breathing deeply, hands on her knees. She spat. ‘God damn it! What was that?’
He held her shoulders, but she twisted away.
‘Terri came into you. Are you all right?’
She shivered, trying to recover her composure.
‘Did she say where she was? That was foul. It hurt.’
‘She tried to guide us. Said go north, look for the four elements.’
The north arrow on the clock in the sidewalk pointed towards the old AT & T Building at 19 5 Broadway. They ran to it. Along the Broadway frontage were four panels in gold leaf on black: a bare-breasted woman of distinctly earthy allure, surrounded by vegetation; a young man disporting himself among birds; another young man, wrapped in flame; a sea sprite of sinuous beauty. Earth. Air. Fire. Water.
Robert reached out again for Terri. He remembered the luxuriant, sensual yellow of the double lover who’d split off from Terri’s body to seduce him at the hotel. Achingly beautiful, sex made light. He found her. Except now she was racked with pain and fear. The figure of the man in flames was resonating in her. He felt cancer spreading through her body. He felt her raging anger at the Iwnw, her forlorn prayers for Adam. Fear for the world. She was seeing the world burning, not just herself. Gently, he coaxed her back towards them, away from her pain. He saw a fleeting image of where she was, a beautiful glass oculus above her head like the eye of death itself. Then he lost it.
‘Kat, I’m going to try to draw Terri back to us. Can you take her inside you again if she can do it again?’
Katherine nodded reluctantly. ‘I’ll try not to resist this time. I’ll try to help her sustain it.’
Robert sought out Terri more strongly, feeling a powerful blocking presence around her. His mind was being diverted from a location he knew well. Suddenly it was a maddening experience. He knew the place where the Ma’rifat’ was located, he realized. He had even been there. But it was so powerfully shielded he could not see it at all, even in his own mind.
‘If they need to kill a Unicorn to achieve the level of conflagration they desire, it makes no sense for them to block the location from me,’ he said to Katherine. ‘Why?’
‘It only makes sense if they’re not ready for you yet. If they’re not yet confident of being able to defeat you. They must be building their strength. Maybe drawing on the power of the red gold. Accumulating energy.’
‘Then Terri has to guide us there before they’re ready. That’s what she’s trying to do. She thinks we still have a chance of stopping this.’
‘Bring her to me. I’m ready.’
Robert sought Terri again and found her sneaking past the Iwnw’s psychic barriers. He harmonized his consciousness with hers and gently drew her into Katherine, who shuddered slightly, then nodded.
‘North,’ Terri said, speaking through Katherine’s mouth. ‘North. Cure Mary. Cure Mary.’
They walked past St Paul’s Chapel, past the obelisk, and crossed Broadway towards City Hall Park. He supported Katherine on his arm.
Terri came hurtling through now, deep-breathing, hoarse. ‘Curare? Plaque, by a tree… Cure? Cure Mary? Oh, God… find it… put it together… it hurts…’
He scoured the trees in the park beyond the railings, heading north. Then he saw what Terri meant: a small black metal plaque near the foot of a tree, honouring Marie Sklodowska Curie, dated 1934. Marie Curie. Cure Mary. Curare. Cure me.
He saw what Terri was doing. She was guiding them to her location, through images of the coming horror. Marie Curie. Radioactivity. X-rays. Atomic.
And an image came into his mind, raging and powerful, of the eye of death staring up from Lower Manhattan, firing bolts of blue-and-yellow light into the sky, a shock-wave of hatred and fear spreading at impossible speed across the face of the globe.
‘It hurts so much,’ Terri moaned. ‘Robert. Walk north… 270. Walk north. 270.’
‘Is that a waypoint? Waypoint 270?’
‘No! Street… Number 270… Street… Manhattan… Oh, fuck, burning, oh, God, burning…’
He saw it. 270 Broadway, at the south-west corner of Broadway and Chambers, was an office building of some twenty storeys, white brick above and riveted black iron girders below, housing a bank. Robert wondered what she could mean.
‘Terri?’
Katherine was shaking with fear now. He willed her to hold on to Terri for just a few moments longer.
‘Terri, are you sure?’
No reply. Just a keening note of pain.
The building displayed heavy black rivets in its beams that reminded him of the heavy black bolts on the bell at St Mark’s. The strongbox at the lock collection.
And suddenly the bell began to toll in his mind. It was a death knell. The bolts were like those he had seen on photos of Fat Man and Little Boy, the first atomic bombs used in anger.
He took out the Quad and googled the address. It got him a series of internet items of no discernible interest. He added ‘Marie Curie’ to the search.
Holy fuck. Only one entry came up. It contained the phrase ‘Manhattan Project’. Number 270 on Broadway was the first home of the drive to build an atomic bomb during World War Two. The Manhattan Project had been housed on this site before being shipped off to Los Alamos, Oak Ridge and other points south and west. This was where it had begun.
Fat Man. Fat Mary. Cure Mary. Cure me.
‘Robert… City Hall… back to City Hall.’
They were just yards from the early-nineteenth-century City Hall building itself, where the mayor had his offices. There was something on the tip of his tongue. His mind screamed at him to remember.
‘Almost under your feet,’ Terri said. ‘Hidden. Under your feet. Find it.’
Terri gave a final scream and abandoned Katherine’s body. Katherine dropped to her knees and retched.
And then the Iwnw’s shield suddenly fell.
An abandoned subway station. Disused. Curved. Arched. The old City Hall Station. It was what his mind had been screaming at him to recall. Closed to the public for more than fifty years. The first station on the first subway line in New York, and still the most beautiful. It was directly below City Hall.
The Quad buzzed. It was Horace.
‘I see it. I suddenly saw it. The old City Hall Station!’
‘I know. I see it too.’
‘This means they are ready for you now. Confident.’
‘I’m ready for them too.’
Katherine stood back up, anger and unshakeable willpower flaring from her.
Horace asked if he knew how to get there.
‘I do.’
‘I’ll be praying for you. Giving you all the power I can.’
‘I know, old friend. I have to go.’
‘One thing, Robert. You still cannot involve the authorities in any way. The Ma’rifat’ would detonate. You understand? Their fear and anger would set it off. This has to be handled by a Unicorn. It is between the Perfect Light and the Iwnw.’
‘I understand.’
Katherine took the Quad from him. ‘Horace, thank you for everything. We’re going to get them now. We’ll save as many people as we can.’
The City Hall Station had been closed originally because it was underused, too small and too curved for the new longer trains. Then the public had been barred from it for security reasons. It was used only as a loop to turn around the trains at the end of the Number 6 line. Despite the security rules, though, Robert’s enthusiasm for gems of New York architecture had twice led him to sneak a peek at the station by hiding on board a turning train. He knew that it had two levels: a platform by the tracks and, above it, an elegant domed ticket hall.
He took Katherine’s hand in his, hefting in the other hand the steel pipe Horace had given him. Her strength seemed to leave her, and he half carried her east along Chambers Street, past the Tweed Courthouse, heading for the other side of City Hall Park and the Number 6 subway.
An elegant dark green elevator, domed in the Budapest style and looking faintly like an old-fashioned British police box, stood on the esplanade on the eastern side of City Hall.
‘The entrance to hell,’ he said to Katherine. ‘Who knew?’
The elevator went down one floor and opened directly opposite the turnstiles. Katherine was reviving. She was able to walk under her own steam as they headed for the Downtown & Brooklyn platform and went down the steps.
They waited for the local 6 train. When it pulled in, a booming voice over the PA system told everyone to get off. Standing halfway along the platform, Robert and Katherine waited till the last possible moment, then leaped aboard just as the doors were closing and ducked down. The train jolted into motion, screeching against the curving rails, and headed into the darkened tunnel. They moved along the train to the rear as it went. When it stopped in the darkness, they stepped from the couplings of the last car on to the platform. The train pulled away.
Robert and Katherine crouched at the furthest corner of the abandoned station and waited for their eyes to get used to the gloom.
Ahead of them, dimly lit by chandeliers and ornate glass skylights, stretched a curved platform and a procession of ribbed arches. Glazed tiles in dark green, cream and dark brown dressed the walls. Attenuated blue light streamed in from the skylights. It was a magical loop, a lost station, a ghostly, sad, beautiful place.
Robert looked for straight lines and found none. His eyes lost themselves in the shadows and curves. An insistent, throbbing note resonated from the walls, insinuating its way into his mind. He could feel the evil presence of the Iwnw in every atom of his body. Up ahead he could make out the mouth of a stairway, leading up towards the ticket hall. A sickly yellow glow emanated from it, punctuated by flickers of red-and-blue light. They were the colours of the eye of death.
He heard water dripping, and the sound of feet moving on stone up ahead. Slowly and deliberately, in the semi-darkness, he crept forward. Katherine was right behind him, hugging the wall.
The glowing lights up ahead changed tone, modulating to a darker yellow as the throbbing bass tone dropped in pitch, dipping to the very edge of his hearing range. He felt himself drawn to the play of light, even as the infrasound of the Ma’rifat’ triggered primal fears in the depths of his mind. The lights were beautiful, seductive.
A few yards along the platform, pushed against the wall, lay a dark, elongated form. Robert sneaked towards it, fearing he knew what it was. He ran his right hand over it. He felt a sticky wet pool of liquid, and the metallic smell of blood flooded his senses. He tried to find a pulse at the throat and found instead a gaping knife wound. He pulled his fingers away involuntarily, stifling a cry of horror. For a moment he couldn’t breathe. Then he composed himself and felt down to the body’s waist. He found an equipment belt, a holster, but no pistol or radio.
‘Cop,’ he whispered. ‘Dead.’
He reached up to the eyes and closed them. The body was still warm. He seemed to be a young man. Would he have to check in every few minutes? How long before he was missed?
Katherine briefly said a prayer over the body, then they moved cautiously along the platform.
The soft sounds of sacred chanting now reached their ears, melding with the deep, otherworldly resonance that echoed in the very tiles and stones of the beautiful cavern. Horace was right to call it the most female space imaginable. The skylights were like rose windows, their beautiful tracery like veins under white skin.
They were at the edge of the steps rising up into the domed ticket bootharea. Robert slowly looked around the corner, keeping his head as low and hidden in shadow as possible. The upper chamber’s arches culminated in a skylight overhead like a single staring eye, the one he had seen in a flicker of an image from Terri.
And, in the centre of the room, directly under the skylight, Robert saw the Ma’rifat’. It was beautiful. A translucent drum of gold and white, it spun slowly, pulsing from within, geometric designs and decorative script shining in different colours as its rims rotated above and below in opposite directions. It stood about four feet off the ground, atop a tapering column of what looked like solid gold. On a clothon the ground next to it were some metallic shapes. A seven-pointed star design, a hexagon, a pyramid, a tiny round drum. The Malice Box that Adam had mailed to him. The core. The master key.
‘Fat Mary,’ Robert whispered. ‘The Ma’rifat’. The Malice Box.’
He climbed slowly to his feet, taking care not to scrape the metal staff he carried on the ground. He heard a footstep behind them, a shuffle and a cry from Katherine. Then his head lit up with pain, and he collapsed, unconscious.
The eye stared into Robert’s soul. He prayed.
… turn fear into love…
Shapes and fragments of city scenes played before his eyes.
… mind like a mirror…
Lines of light and longing, lust and fear.
… merciful heart…
He reached out with his mind. It was the gift he had buried for more than twenty years, singing out into the unseen space around him, listening in return. It was a gradual erosion of the separateness of things. He felt everything bathed in a beautiful, barely visible light.
A man’s voice rang out. Rasping. Exhausted. ‘Robert.’
The one who’d attacked him on the subway. The same distorted bark.
It was time to fight. He was ready. He cast his mind far into the past.
… forgive him…
Robert opened his eyes. Directly across from him stood a figure in black, a man, breathless, crouching. His face was hidden, but Robert knew him, knew the stance, the familiar crossing of the arms across the chest, the lowered head.
‘Adam,’ he said.
Adam looked up, only his eyes showing in the darkness. Behind him, Robert could make out other shadowy figures. Three wraiths in black cowls softly chanted words he had never heard but that penetrated his heart with darkness. Beside them, a few feet to his left, he saw a slumped form on stone steps. Terri. He could see a red nimbus of pain around the head and stomach.
‘Rickles,’ Adam rasped, a note of fear in his voice. Then, gathering his composure, ‘We meet again. For the last time, I think.’
His voice echoed in the great curved space around them. ‘You are no longer Adam. You’ve killed Adam. You are evil. You’re just another henchman of the Iwnw.’
‘They work through me. But I am, just, still the Adam you all know and love.’
‘If so, I can help you.’
‘So you can. Though perhaps not in the way you imagine. We come to “a great reckoning in a little room”. It is my destiny, it seems.’
‘From As You Like It?’
‘Yes, though I do not like it at all.’
‘Where is Katherine?’
‘Out cold, I’m afraid.’ Adam pointed out of Robert’s eyeshot. ‘She’s not hurt, though. Not yet.’
A train screeched by below like a banshee. He saw that the Ma’rifat’ dimmed its glow and stilled its deep throb until it had gone.
‘I know what you’re thinking. There are fairly regular police visits down here. The Iwnw had to kill the last cop who came round. But I’ve moved his body now. No one will find us. Not in time. And, if they did, they would just set it off. Not in the way my masters wish, though. Hence the rather more elaborate preparations we’ve made.’
‘Robert, Robert. You don’t realize who you are, do you?’
‘Who I am?’
‘In a sense, you are the weapon. We have gathered everything needed to detonate the Device at its full potential. All the keys. The core, the trigger. The red gold warehoused near by. But we can’t do it alone. The final component is a Unicorn. A being of great beauty and power of spirit, sacrificed by the Iwnw. Which is to say… you, Robert. It’s what you’ve always been. What you’ve always denied. Why I sought you out all those years ago. Why Katherine sought refuge with you.’
‘I won’t do it.’
‘You will. We will fight, and the Iwnw who work through me, who compel me, will compel you. You will break, and you will die. You will have no choice. And, in dying, you will detonate the Malice Box.’
‘I will not.’
Suddenly the chanting stopped. The Ma’rifat’ fell silent at the same instant. The change was so absolute that the absence of sound hit Robert like a blow to the eardrums.
The tallest of the three black-cowled figures spoke from within his own darkness and shadow. ‘A Unicorn. At last. We are honoured.’
Robert recognized the leader of the three men Horace and he had fought at Grand Central.
‘Free Katherine and Terri. Release Terri from her pain,’ Robert said. ‘Reverse her cancer. Then perhaps we can talk.’
The Iwnw leader laughed drily, removing his cowl from his head. ‘No, that is not satisfactory. Let me explain a few things. You may think that you are in the right, because you have been initiated and moulded by a member of the Perfect Light. The rightful masters of the Path and its powers, though, are not they but we: the Brotherhood of the Column. Iwnw. Consider your own situation. You have faced death, not once but several times, in order to attain your remarkable set of powers in a very short period. We tried hard to kill you a few times ourselves.’
‘I thought you needed me.’
‘If we had been able to succeed, it would simply have shown that you were not the being you were reputed to be. Indeed, our efforts helped to activate in you the powers that brought you through the trials. Very few could have survived sucha series of ordeals. We love Horace’s work, sometimes. You are a member of an elite, and a chosen one even among that elite. Should you not… rule? Wisely, of course, and fairly, but look. Look at the world.’
As the black-robed figure spoke, Robert sought Katherine in his mind’s eye. Adam had spoken the truth – she was unhurt, and recovering consciousness now. She was more alert, already, than she was letting on. Then he tried to reach again towards Terri. Carefully shielding his action, he tried to see into her belly. What he found there filled him with bleakness. Massive, racing cell division. The cancer had metastasized rapidly. He kept his overt gaze on the black-robed man. The other two Iwnw men resumed their chant in the background, and the Ma’rifat’ responded to them, shifting its own rhythmic pulse in time with them.
‘Look what the human race has done with the world, while the transformative powers of the Path are with held, kept secret, by the high-minded fools of the Perfect Light. A planet poisoned, thrown perhaps permanently out of vital balance, perhaps already doomed if strong leaders do not act very soon. Massive overpopulation, draining the resources of the planet, billions of people piled into decaying cities that spread like blight over the surface of the earth. Chaotic international relations. Constant war. Unceasing brutality. Millions of children dying horribly of preventable diseases. You may have been led to believe that we are planning an act of horrific evil. But look at the world as it is now. One would think such an act had already taken place.’
Robert stood completely still, drawing from deep within himself the powers of earth and water, fire and air, ether and mind and spirit. He made his mind a perfect mirror, reflecting back the rising tide of black venom the Iwnw were pouring towards him. And he poured the most powerful healing energy he could summon towards Terri, wrapping the cancer cells in white light, trying to reverse the evil wrought upon her. He had to play for time.
‘What are your intentions? What do you want?’
‘Human beings have become a disease. Most do not deserve to live. Most do not even live at all. They are asleep to their own potential their entire lives, and then they die. They eat, they rut, they kill each other, they defecate, they dream of something better but don’t really want anything different to what they have. They are lazy. A vast reservoir of psychic power, almost entirely untapped.’
‘So, enslave them and rule? Modern-day pharaohs? Farm their minds?’
‘You mock, but you would be one of the rulers. One who steers the flock. In any case, as you know, the Iwnw follow all the facets of the Path, not just the pretty ones. There is great power and strength in fear, in hatred, in contempt. It is from those emotions that we derive our own power. The Ma’rifat’ can destroy Manhattan, certainly. It would already have done so if the pathetic creature entangled with Adam had managed to carry out his original plan. That alone would enable us to destroy, at one fell swoop, the world’s leading financial centre, the babbling incompetents at the United Nations and a city that exemplifies the collective illness known as democracy.’
Robert felt Terri respond, felt her embrace the power he was sending her. He poured all the light he could covertly send into her body’s own healing systems.
Still he listened, stone-faced, to the leader of the Iwnw.
‘But a true soul bomb, a true alchemical engine geared to exploding in the consciousness of perhaps a billion people within a few seconds… that would be a far more effective tool. An instantaneous psychic collapse, driving everyone to the lowest, rawest, darkest levels of human possibility. Nation fearing nation, village fearing village, unable to abide difference of any kind – of language, of skin colour, of accent, of smell. Missile launches, quite possibly nuclear. First strikes. Retaliation. Round-ups of all those who don’t belong to whichever tribe you happen to belong to. Children denouncing parents. Parents betraying children, neighbours handing over neighbours to concentration camps. Killing, and more killing. Rwanda in America. Srebrenica in America. New Dachaus and Belsens and Auschwitzes across the world. Those are the energies we wish to unleash. So that we may feed, and in feeding grow so powerful as to be unstoppable. And, after feeding, we will impose order on those who remain. We shall save the planet for our own kind, and rule!’
Silence fell except for the thrumming of the Ma’rifat’, which had deepened in tone and grown in strength as the intensity of hatred in the arched chamber had risen.
‘Go to hell,’ Robert spat in disdain.
‘We are already there.’
The image broke into Robert’s consciousness, again, of the eye of death propagating massively from Lower Manhattan out into the world, the hateful, magnetic ball of blue fire flaring across the Atlantic Ocean and down the mountain spine of the Andes, the dead black hole at its core feeding on hatred and fear in an ever-widening circle.
Breathing hard now, Robert strained to maintain his shield, his mirror-mind. They were stronger than he had expected. Far stronger. Still he fed healing power to Terri, unable to tell now whether it was working.
Adam drew near and whispered into Robert’s ear: ‘You’ll even take out a US president. He’s at the Waldorf-Astoria. He won’t get to give his big speech at the Convention tonight. You’ll appreciate this: they used the hidden old railway siding under the hotel to bring him in.’
He heard Katherine stir. He had to get her out. For the first time, Robert was truly beginning to fear he might fail. Though there was something he still didn’t understand.
‘If the Ma’rifat’ explodes, do we not all die?’
Again the dry laugh of the Iwnw leader echoed from the vaulted arches of the ticket hall. ‘No. We will be shielded, and can shield others if we choose. The Ma’rifat’ is a true alchemical device, which is to say it opens up a gateway between worlds. There is a world of pure consciousness that rarely incarnates. You have seen it, if you have passed the Trial by Mind. You have seen, perhaps, consciousness and matter in their true relationship, their timeless dance of each flowing into the other. Those of us who are Iwnw in this world ultimately serve the discarnate Iwnw in that world, the insatiable hunger, the dark intelligence that needs human fear and pain to live. The eye of death. The Iwnw found us, their three servants. The Iwnw found the maker of the Ma’rifat’ and fed upon him. Through him, the Iwnw fed upon Adam. Through Adam, the Iwnw reached Terri, and tinkered with the structure of a certain cell. Life to death. Future child to cancer.’
He paused for breath, then spat out his words with violent hatred. ‘Through Terri, on the day you people know as the Blackout, the Iwnw reached even into Katherine Reckliss, into her baby-to-be, and sucked its life force into that very same cancer.’
Suddenly a human form flew past Robert from behind him, arms outstretched, and grabbed the throat of the white-haired man. It was Katherine. At the same instant Terri launched herself from the steps and grabbed another of the black-robed figures from behind. She swung him round and slammed him into the wall, then leaped for the steel pipe Adam had taken from Robert after knocking him unconscious. As she grabbed it, twin snakes of spitting energy flared into life along its shaft. She jammed one end into the man’s belly, then spun the staff and slammed it into his head.
Reacting a split second later, Robert leaped at the third Iwnw member, summoning all the raw power of his desire to live into a single punch to the chest that sent the man flying backwards against the rear wall of the chamber. Tiling cracked and smashed behind him where he hit the wall, yet he walked straight back at Robert and punched him powerfully in the belly. Robert doubled over in pain.
As he fell, Robert saw Adam stride to the Ma’rifat’ and insert the remaining keys, one by one. Then Adam took the core, the smaller Malice Box, and jammed it into the top of the greater Malice Box.
With a deafening crack of energy and blue-yellow flame, the Ma’rifat’ spat a twisting, swirling column of fire six feet into the air from its upper rim. Red filaments flared within the flame and spread along the curves of the arched dome, crackling and spitting as the eye of death gathered and formed above and all around them.
Everywhere Robert looked, the eye was there, staring into his soul. It wanted him. It wanted them all. It wanted millions of souls. The seductive flowing colours of the eye flared red and yellow as he felt blows raining down on his back and head. The Ma’rifat’ was preparing to detonate. Out of the corner of his eye, Robert saw Adam standing with his arms thrust directly into the twisting white column of fire atop the Device, his face contorted in agony.
Robert forced himself to his feet and drove headfirst into his assailant’s ribs, again driving him back against the wall. Forks of yellow light shot from the tiles and propagated into the eye of death. Before Robert could hit him, Terri stepped forward and slugged his man with her staff. The black-robed figure fell awkwardly and lay still. Then Robert turned to see Katherine struggling at the top of the steps to break a stranglehold by the leader of the Iwnw. Before Robert could reach her, the man lifted her by the neck and threw her down the stairs towards the darkened train platform below.
Terri was on him a second later, driving her flaring staff into his back below the left shoulder blade. The steel pipe pierced him right through the chest.
‘That’s for Jay, you fucker,’ she shouted. The man teetered on his feet for a moment, an expression of sheer hatred frozen on his face. Then he fell, and Terri ran down the steps to Katherine.
‘I’ll take care of her,’ Terri shouted. ‘What’s Adam doing?’
Robert turned to face the Ma’rifat’ and Adam, who pulled his hands from the column of fire and advanced towards Robert.
‘You have killed three of the Iwnw. That means the Iwnw now work only through me. It makes me stronger.’
‘You don’t have to do this. I’m here to disarm the Ma’rifat’. That is all.’
‘That is not all. We have come to single combat. The simplicity is appealing. I kill you, and a billion people die, in the blast or in the soul corrosion that will follow. You trigger Armageddon. But I live, Terri lives, with her pregnancy restored, under the protection of the Iwnw.’
‘Does she want that?’
‘Consider the alternative. She has none.’
‘I don’t believe that. Don’t hide behind the idea of saving Terri. She would never accept that. There’s no deal. It’s just a figleaf for the fact that the Iwnw own you.’
‘I wouldn’t be so sure. But if you kill me, you disarm the Ma’rifat’ and vanquish the Iwnw, who with draw to fight another day. All those people are saved. But Terri dies of cancer.’
Robert still couldn’t see whether he’d been able to heal Terri. He still felt he could.
‘I am a Unicorn,’ Robert said. ‘And I will die if I have to. But no one else will today. Except you.’
He lunged at Adam and locked his hands around his throat. Adam almost lazily unhooked him and sent him spinning back against the wall. ‘I don’t think so, Robert.’
Adam seemed to grab the air in his fist and twist it. Robert’s head exploded in pain. Black waves broke over him. The eye of death shimmered yellow and blue, staring at him from all directions.
The black tinged to red. The Ma’rifat’ spun, faster and faster, spitting off shards of blue lightning. A deep, thrumming vibration filled the air. It was the slow thunder of impending detonation.
Robert lunged again at Adam. They locked hands around each other’s throats.
‘You’ll break, and you’ll die, Robert,’ Adam spat, the bilious yellow light of the Iwnw spilling from his eyes and mouth. ‘Just like they broke me.’
Adam threw him against the wall. The Ma’rifat’ screamed as it spun, the very stones around them shaking with its thunder, lightning bolts flying from it in red, blue, green. Robert felt himself losing. His strength was falling away. He closed his eyes.
In the blackness there was a still blacker light. His retinas were raw, his brain was crackling and mushing like a radio near a power line. His skin had all but vanished; there was almost no membrane left between him and the world. He was jammed open. His insides and his outsides were flowing into each other. Wherever he looked, the black hole at the centre of the eye of death was draining his powers, his very will to live.
‘Horace,’ he whispered.
‘Horace is an old man,’ Adam sneered. ‘He can’t help you any more.’
Blackness closed in. He saw the irresistible, beautiful, terrifying eye form a microcosm of itself around Adam’s head. It was calling to him.
‘Time to die, Robert.’
Adam pulled Terri’s staff from the body of the Iwnw leader and swung it in the air.
Terri raised her head, sensing what was happening. She ran up the stairs.
‘No,’ Terri shouted. ‘You can’t kill him!’
Adam brought the staff crashing down towards Robert’s neck. Terri leaped into the path of the weapon with a scream, taking its full force on her own head with a sickening crunch. She fell down at Adam’s feet, her skull fractured.
Adam stood for an instant in paralysed horror, then dropped to his knees, flinging the steel stave to one side with a roar of pain.
‘No!’
Adam cradled her head in his arms. She was dead. He screamed in inarticulate rage.
Robert stared in disbelief as he climbed to his feet. She’d given her life for his. She’d seen Adam about to finally lose his battle with the Iwnw, about to kill Robert, and she’d chosen to die rather than to let that happen. She looked so small in Adam’s arms. A great wave of tenderness broke over him. She had given Robert the strength to survive the trials. He owed her his life twice over.
The raw scream of the Ma’rifat’ began to modulate. Barely perceptible harmonic tones began to sound.
Then Adam lay Terri gently down and got to his feet. He advanced towards Robert, a look of crippled grief on his face.
Robert looked deep within himself and sought the resources for a last battle. Die to live. He would abandon any hope of survival, if only he could stop the detonation.
Then he felt his limbs begin to glow. Arms and legs and then his whole body. He opened his eyes and looked down. He was a body of light. He was the swirling angel Terri had shown him at the beginning of the hunt, clad in a garment of spiralling light that slowly absorbed itself into his skin. He felt Horace’s protective energy surrounding him.
Adam leaped on Robert with a cry like a wild animal. They both fell and rolled down the steps to the platform, past the unconscious form of Katherine.
Robert hauled himself to his feet and grabbed Adam by the throat. Adam twisted from his grip and punched Robert on the jaw. Robert grappled with him, and they bothoverbalanced and fell on to the subway tracks. He pulled Adam to his feet.
The eye formed again around Adam. The face of death. It spoke: ‘Who are you?’
‘My name is Robert Reckliss.’
‘We are Iwnw.’
‘You are the devil.’
‘If you wish. You cannot win.’
‘Free my friend.’
‘No.’
He dug deep into his memory. Found his last possible weapons. He saw the words that Lawrence and Adam had meant to communicate to him.
‘I learned these words from Adam and from two friends, Horace and Lawrence Hencott. A man you tortured and killed.’
‘What words?’
‘The words of power. The words used to gain mastery of the red gold, and the Philosopher’s Stone.’
‘No.’
‘For the red gold: quaero arcana mundi. “I seek the secrets of the world.” ’
Now he remembered the phrase that Lawrence had so clearly wanted him to remember. Vile, Intense Torture Reveals Impossibility Of Living. It was the same word Adam had given him at the very start of the trials.
‘The answer is vitriol.’
‘Stop.’
Then he began to quote from Newton’s Papers. From the words Adam had made Newton speak at the climax of the play. The words that had appeared on the typewriter in Katherine’s room, the night of the fire.
‘For the Philosopher’s Stone: Flamma unica clavis mundi.’
‘Stop.’
‘“The key to the world is a single flame.”’
‘No.’
‘I accept Adam’s evil and take it into myself. He is part of me, and I am the stronger part.’
‘No.’
The eye flared with blue light, shrinking back from him. More powerful harmonic tones issued from the Ma’rifat’. It was stabilizing, feeding on his mind. On his soul.
And then he saw the final line that Adam had been going to pronounce at the end of the play, when the tree and the drum of light had ignited. He realized he had known it all along. Adam had hidden it in plain sight.
‘Omnia vincit amor! ’
‘Stop! No!’
‘Omnia vincit amor! Love! Conquers! All!’
He opened his eyes. The eye recoiled in fear as it flared around Adam’s head. But then Adam smiled.
And Robert saw the innermost plan that Adam had been shielding from the darkness, from the Iwnw, until the last possible moment.
Robert looked into the eye. Spoke into it.
‘I understand.’
‘What?’
‘Adam wants me to kill him.’
‘No.’
‘He realizes he is incapable of escaping you.’
‘No.’
‘He has tricked you all along. He has been waiting for the moment when I would be psychically capable of defeating him. Spiritually powerful enough to do it.’
‘No.’
‘It is the only way to break your power and disarm the Ma’rifat’. This is how Adam will save everyone, at the cost of his own life.’
‘No. Wrong. Now you will die.’
‘No. When he plunged his arms into the column of fire of the Ma’rifat’, he was trying to slow it down. To delay the detonation. He succeeded. And when at the last moment you truly had taken him over, Terri stopped him from killing me. To give his plan one last chance to work. She knew all along.’
‘No. Now die.’
A scream of primal evil exploded from the centre of the eye as it blew apart in a flare of yellow-and-blue flame.
Robert stared into Adam’s eyes. Adam saw that he had understood. Robert held his friend’s stare for a moment without time. Then he pushed Adam on to the third rail and stepped back.
Adam’s body jerked upright, his head snapping back, and for endless seconds he seemed to resist the power of the coursing electricity crackling and spitting through him, standing upright and swaying at the knees as acrid smoke and a stench of burned flesh filled the sweltering air of the underground station.
Then Adam rolled his eyes back in his head and let himself go, a hand raised in gratitude. He fell lifeless at Robert’s feet.
The Ma’rifat’ slowed, its harmonies now haunting, beautiful.
Robert knelt down and closed Adam’s eyes. Then he dragged the body across the tracks and lifted it up on to the platform. He stepped across to Katherine and cradled her in his arms, stroking her hair. She was still barely conscious. He wept for a long moment for his friend Adam. He saw images of his crazy games, his wild heart, his endless imagination, his kindness and indomitable sense of fun. Then Robert saw the sickly yellow light that had consumed him, his unshakeable will to fight to the last moment, the steepling, self-sacrificing risks he had taken to ensure the detonation would be halted at the last minute.
‘I’m sorry, my friend,’ he whispered. ‘Thank you.’
He walked up the stairs to the Ma’rifat’.
He stood over the beautiful machine, its rims now slowly spinning, the column of fire extinguished, and removed its keys, one by one, from their slots around its glowing body.
When it was done, he called Horace. ‘The Ma’rifat’ is disarmed. Terri and Adam are dead. They gave their lives.’
‘Dear heaven. Get out of there. Then please come to me. Bring the Ma’rifat’ so I can destroy it.’
