Document 6460315

SIMON DYDA
A KING CONCEALED
Copyright © 2012 by Simon Dyda
All rights reserved. Except for text references by reviewers, the reproduction of this work in any
form is forbidden without permission from the author.
ISBN: 978-1-4717-7079-1
‘When we look back at the “noughties”—pausing briefly to gently vomit in protest at
the hideous made-up word “noughties”—we’ll realise this was a golden age for
absolute bollocks. Fun bollocks, maybe … but bollocks all the same.’
CHARLIE BROOKER
ONE
She lay on the cold slab, robbed of all warmth, a hollow shell empty of all emotion,
staring into nothingness with vacant eyes stripped of all expression, psyche
extinguished, intellect ousted, eloquence lost—sealed behind silenced lips in an ashen
face—her beauty a pale shadow of itself, a mockery of life.
Teltow cleared his throat. In his black leather overcoat, his skin bleached by the
morgue’s bright white fluorescent light, the überblond hatchet-faced Europol officer
looked like some character in a vampire flick from the Noughties. He raised an
eyebrow and asked: ‘Do you recognize her?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Should I?’
‘No, I suppose not.’
‘What do you want me to look at?’
‘The palm of her left hand.’
I took hold of the chill hand and stiffened forearm and gently forced them round to
get a look at her palm. It took me a moment to work out what I was looking at. The
tattoo on her palm—consisting of a couple of dark blue curved horizontal lines, a
short vertical line and a curving tendril—had been partially defaced by a vicious,
broad straight-edged burn mark.
‘It’s the Wedjat,’ I said. ‘The Eye of Horus. Or at least it used to be before somebody
burned its eye out.’
‘What’s its significance?’
‘The Eye of Horus? It’s a sign of protection, used to ward off the Evil Eye.’
‘That fits,’ Teltow nodded to himself, nostrils flaring. He pulled a pen and a small
notepad out and, frowning, scribbled something down.
‘Who is this girl? What happened to her?’
‘You know how it is,’ Teltow shrugged. ‘Need to know, and all that.’
‘Be serious, Teltow. This is me you’re talking to. You didn’t drag me all the way to
Berlin just for this. You could have faxed me a photo. We do have fax machines in
Wales, you know. This is something personal. Who is she? A relative?’
Teltow sighed, shook his head and said: ‘This is neither the time nor the place.’
‘Look,’ I said. ‘If somebody really was giving this girl the Evil Eye then I can help
you make sense of all the mumbo jumbo involved. You know that. What else am I
here for?’
Teltow hesitated. The occult didn’t weird him out as much as it did other police
detectives, but I knew he didn’t want to be seen in my company if he could help it. I
understood that. As far as Europol were concerned I was bad news; as a
troubleshooter in the occult underworld of Europe I had crossed their paths too many
times. I tied up loose ends, but rarely in a way that would satisfy any police force.
A petite young doe-eyed brunette wearing a morgue assistant’s white scrubs came
through the door and froze in mid stride, startled to find us there.
‘Ah, Sabina,’ Teltow said in an officious tone. ‘Perfect timing. Could you please
make yourself useful and put this cadaver away for us? Thanks.’
I knew what he was doing: pulling rank and issuing instructions in order to avoid
entering into a conversation in which he might have to explain what the hell we were
doing there. Considering that as a Europol officer he had no jurisdiction outside of a
building in the Hague and no more right to be snooping around a police station at
night than I did, it was quite a neat trick to pull off. Teltow walked out the door and I
followed, but not before giving the brunette a friendly wink. She ignored me,
focusing her attention on the corpse on the slab.
‘That was close,’ I told Teltow out in the corridor.
‘I’m sure I have no idea know what you’re talking about,’ he said without much
conviction.
We walked in silence to the back entrance of the building and out into the drizzle of
the police car park facing Kruppstraße.
‘Let’s go for a drink,’ Teltow said, pointing a set of car keys at his BMW and
unlocking the doors with a beep beep.
We drove through the dark rain and, leaving Moabit behind, crossed over the
Fennbrücke into Wedding, coming to a halt in the pitch black of Nordufer.
‘Are we going where I think we’re going?’ I asked.
‘Surprised I know about this place?’
I was. Getting out of the car we walked alongside a hedge in the wet darkness. A
sudden break in the hedge revealed a small deserted beer garden and beyond that the
dimly lit entrance to Johnny Faust’s bar. A black star made up of eight arrows
emanating from a sphere adorned the door.
‘You know what to expect inside, don’t you?’
Teltow shrugged. ‘The symbol on the door is the same one you have engraved on
your zippo,’ he said. ‘I figure if I’m in your company, I won’t have to worry about
what to expect in there.’
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Just follow me and don’t talk to anyone.’
Johnny Faust’s was a small enough place; a modest sized barroom with tables and
chairs lining three walls and a varnished wooden counter taking up the fourth. A
colourful collage of posters depicting characters and scenes from graphic novels
covered the walls: deities and demons, magicians and maniacs, ghosts and gods,
heroes, anti-heroes and tentacled things, taken from the works of Moorcock, Moore,
Morrisson and many more. The mutating melody of improvised jazz bled out of
speakers positioned in all four corners of the room.
The manager was working behind the bar tonight. A gangly, middle-aged albino,
everybody knew him as Orlok on account of his shaven head and his aversion to
daylight. He had been running the bar for longer than anyone cared to remember.
Apart from Orlok, a goth girl he was chatting to over the counter and two men
dressed as Catholic priests sat at a nearby table debating the validity of the word
hypersigil, Johnny Faust’s was deserted.
I asked Orlok for two from the tap, then led Teltow through a lonely alcove in the far
wall into a back room that was little more than a dead end passageway wide enough
to fit a few tables in. We sat ourselves down and waited for Orlok to bring us our
beer.
‘So who was she?’ I asked.
Teltow fidgeted in his chair, averting his eyes. He’d been doing a lot of that tonight.
‘Her name was Anna Herbert. Online she called herself the Halcyon Kid.’
‘The Halcyon Kid?’
‘You’ve heard of her?’
‘Sure. Sells sigils on Second Life or something.’
‘That’s the one. She was also the owner of the Halcyon Days Sim. In real life she
came to Berlin from Breslau two years ago to study anthropology at Humboldt.’
Orlok came and placed two large glasses of frothy- headed blond beer on the table.
‘Good to see you back in Berlin,’ the albino said. ‘We’ll have to get together some
time and do some catching up.’ That was Orlok’s way of saying he had something to
tell me.
‘Sure,’ I said with a nod. The albino returned to the bar and Teltow continued his
story.
‘Anyway,’ he said. ‘Five months ago I got reassigned to Europol’s Cyber Crime Unit,
specifically to deal with a series deaths across the EU. Almost all the victims were
scholars or students, but from different academic fields. A mix of quantum physicists
and neurologists, mostly. Their deaths were a series of seemingly unrelated accidents
and in some cases suicides. It was somebody at Scotland Yard who discovered the
link. Their deaths had all followed a similar pattern: each and every one of them had
over a period of weeks become withdrawn from their social circles, had started
displaying signs of paranoia and had neglected their normal health and dietary
routines, effectively turning into unkempt and malnourished hermits.’
‘In other words,’ I said, ‘they were being hexed.’
‘I suspect so now,’ Teltow nodded, ‘but that’s really your department. Suffice to say
the similar behavioural changes displayed by the deceased aroused somebody’s
suspicions at Scotland Yard. Further investigation established that all the dead
scholars had been members of a Second Life group called the Temporal Institute.’
‘Never heard of it.’
‘Hardly surprising, it’s some kind of virtual secret society. A closed group.
Membership is invite-only, as is entry to their virtual HQ, located inside the Halcyon
Days Sim.’
‘This is beginning to sound like the plot of some show on Syfy,’ I said disparagingly.
I excused myself and went for a slash. A moment later Orlok joined me at the urinal.
‘That urgent, huh?’ I said, concentrating on my aim.
‘There was a strange bloke looking for you this afternoon,’ Orlok said.
I wondered how strange a bloke had to be to be considered strange by a bloke like
Orlok. ‘That’s interesting,’ I said. ‘I didn’t tell anyone I was coming to Berlin today.
Didn’t know myself till this morning. So what was strange about him?’
‘Well, for a start he was dressed up like Sherlock Holmes, deerstalker and all. He
seemed convinced you’d be here at four thirty in the afternoon. He was mighty put
out by your absence.’
‘That is strange. Especially as I very well could have been here at that time if my
flight hadn’t been delayed.’
‘Then when he saw that you weren’t coming he started asking odd questions. Like
whether you’d started carrying around a pocket watch, and whether you’d hooked up
with some broad called Halcyone.’
‘Halcyone?’ I said, thinking: the Halcyon Kid? ‘So what did you tell him?’
‘What could I tell him? Last time I saw you was a year ago.’
‘Right. Well, thanks for the heads up,’ I said.
When I got back to the table Teltow was staring at the muted TV mounted on the wall
at the end of the room, watching a subtitled news report. ‘Weird,’ he said.
An image of a hotel came on the screen. ‘Isn’t that the New Excelsior?’ I asked. It
was the hotel Teltow had booked me into.
Teltow nodded. ‘Some nuts claim they found a bear in one of the rooms tonight.’
‘A bear?’ I laughed. ‘I guess acid must be back in fashion, then. Hope it wasn’t my
room they found it in.’
TWO
‘I’ll show you,’ Dee said.
Halcyone followed the Welsh sorcerer into the study of his Cecil Court lodgings.
Bookshelves filled with heavy leather-bound volumes filled two walls.
‘Quite a collection,’ Halcyone said.
‘Purely decorative, I can assure you,’ Dee said. ‘I keep all my real reading material on
my Kindle.’
‘A Kindle? Hardly something you can read in public this side of the millennium, I
would have thought.’
‘I try to be discreet, not that it matters much in this timeline. Now then, I just need a
piece of paper and a pen . . .’
Dee went over to the mahogany twin pedestal desk that stood between the study’s
two windows.
Halcyone followed him and stared out of one of the windows as Dee rifled through
the desk drawers. Down on the street a horse-drawn Hackney came to a halt outside
one of the houses opposite and a tall man in tweed wearing a deerstalker and holding
a curved pipe stepped down from the cab.
‘Goodness me,’ Halcyone said. ‘Another Sherlock. And this one’s wearing his
deerstalker and tweed in the city. Should we warn him?’
‘No,’ Dee said over her shoulder. ‘I have no time for role players. Especially one that
commits such a sartorial faux pas. Anyway, back to the demonstration.’
Halcyone turned and faced the Welshman. Dee, pen in hand, placed an A4 sheet of
paper on the desk.
‘First you write down a simple sentence expressing your desire,’ he said. ‘For
example . . .’
Dee wrote some words down and showed them to Halcyone.
I WISH TO OBTAIN THE YELLOW SIGN
‘Why on earth would anyone wish to obtain the Yellow Sign?’ she asked.
‘They wouldn’t. Just a hypothetical example, my dear. Next you remove the repeated
letters, leaving you with . . .’
I WSH TO BAN E YL G
‘I see,’ Halcyone said.
‘Finally, you rearrange the letters to create a pictorial sign.’ Dee drew a large O,
halved it with an I and then proceeded to place the other letters symmetrically within
its circumference.
‘And there we have,’ he said when he had finished, ‘one way of creating a sigil. Liber
MMM calls it the “word method.”’
‘That simple?’
‘Not quite. We have only created the sigil. We have yet to employ it. To do that we
must forget it and later charge it.’
‘Forget it?’
‘Indeed. The sigil represents a desired result, but desire leads to anxiety, to fear of
failure. That is why we hide the desire within a sigil, one sigil among many the
magician has created, so that only the subconscious remembers which sigil expresses
which desire when the time comes to deploy them.’
‘But what if I want an instant result? Or at least a quicker one?’
‘One step at a time, my young padawan.’
Downstairs the doorbell tinkled.
‘It seems we have a visitor. Come, I shall await you in the consulting room.’
They left the study, Halcyone descending the stairs to the ground floor while Dee
returned to his consulting room where he sat himself before the fire and pretended to
read an article in The Register about Prince Robert, the Prince of Wales and his recent
visit on behalf of Queen Mary IV & III to the Commonwealths of America.
A polite knock at the door from Halcyone in her guise as Dee’s landlady signalled
that they did indeed have a visitor.
‘Come in, Miss McFly,’ Dee bellowed cheerfully.
‘Sorry for disturbing you Dr Brown,’ Halcyone said from the doorway. ‘But a Mr
Sherlock Holmes has asked if he could speak with you.’
‘Great Scott,’ Dee exclaimed dryly. ‘Not the one in the deerstalker?’
‘The very same,’ the tall Holmes said walking into the room, an emaciated, Roman
nosed, blue eyed Holmes wearing a knowing smile. ‘Sherlock Holmes, consulting
detective, at your service,’ he said with a bow.
‘Indeed. New to the role, I take it?’
‘Entirely,’ the Holmes said, sitting himself down opposite Dee and pulling a pack of
John Players out of a jacket pocket. ‘Smoke?’ he said, offering the pack to Dee.
‘No thanks. So what do you want, Mr . . . ?’
‘Call me Sherlock. It’s as good a name as any.’
‘One of at least a dozen Sherlock Holmes wandering around this London, although
possibly the least informed regarding the character’s dress code. If the Censors don’t
get you, you can expect one of the other Holmes or their Watsons and Moriarties to
put a bullet in the back of your head out of sheer indignation.’
‘I couldn’t give a flying toss about historical detail and the sensibilities of role
players,’ the Holmes said. ‘And you know as well as I do, Lord Psychonaut, that the
Censors do not give a fig about the Jacobite timelines. Oh yes,’ he added on seeing
Dee bristle at the use of his nick. ‘I know all about you, Lord Psychonaut, and I know
all about your club for quantum conjurers.’
‘What do you want. Spit it out or get out.’
‘What do I want? I want to know where and when I can find another member of your
club. I want to find the man they call the Thelemite.’
Dee broke into laughter. He held his sides and guffawed until tears flooded his eyes.
The Holmes lit his cigarette and waited for the Welshman’s laughter to subside. His
knowing smile began to look strained.
‘You want to find the Thelemite?’ Dee gasped between sobs of mirth. ‘Do you have a
death wish?’
‘Perhaps I do, Lord Psychonaut, perhaps I do. Now, where can I find him? When?’
Dee settled back in his leather armchair and wiped the tears from his eyes. ‘What on
earth do you want the Thelemite for? And why on earth should I help you find him?’
The Holmes produced a brass whistle, put it to his lips and blew. The whistle
remained silent, but almost immediately screams of terror and yells of panic filtered
through the windows. ‘Take a look,’ he said.
Both Dee and Halcyone, who had waited in the doorway, went over to the room’s
central window and looked down on Cecil Court. Below in the now empty narrow
thoroughfare four snarling hairy beasts stood facing the house, each one the size of a
polar bear, their heads and faces a combination of ursine and canine features. Each
had its own colour: one red, one brown, one grey, one black. They swished their tails
and looked up at Dee and Halcyone with human eyes.
‘What the—?’ Halcyone hissed.
‘Genies,’ Dee said.
‘Quite,’ the Holmes chuckled. ‘Amphicyanthropes to be exact. We know where and
when to find you, Lord Psychonaut, so—like the hounds of Tindalos—we can hunt
you down across time and space, if we must.’
‘I see,’ Dee said, fingering the chain of his pocket watch and shooting a sideways
glance at Halcyone.
Sensing their intent, the Holmes began a rapid metamorphosis behind them, the
tweed falling off him in ripped shreds as his torso twisted, swelled and became
covered in a blueish grey pelt of fur. But Dee and Halcyone already held their pocket
watches in their hands and an instant later they had vanished into thin air.
The ululating anger of five bear-dogs echoed through the streets of Covent Garden.
They stood in the consulting room, alone. Outside a blanket of snow covered Cecil
Court, criss-crossed by marks of feet, hooves and wheels as Londoners went about
their daily business, blissfully unaware of the existence of men who turned into beardogs. The late Victorian decor—or Mariatheresan decor as the inhabitants of the
Jacobite timelines called it—of their Cecil Court lodgings had disappeared, replaced
by a mixture of rococo, Gothic and chinoiserie with a touch of the orient. Instead of a
framed photograph of Mary IV & III, a portrait of her grandmother Mary III & II now
hung on the wall.
‘I think I need bringing up to speed on a few matters,’ Halcyone said.
‘Yes of course,’ Dee said. ‘Then we must continue our flight. This place and time
only serves as a short emergency stopover. We must assume that the genie meant
what he said concerning his ability to track us down.’
‘Genie? As in Aladdin?’
‘Genie as in genetically engineered. They come from a technologically advanced
future, where they have mastered both the human genome and time travel, the two
sciences necessary for the colonization of the stars. Indeed, I believe our pocket
watches derive from their technology.’
‘So what the hell do they want with your friend, the Thelemite? And why did they
come to you?’
‘I can only guess that it has something to do with his mastery of Hadit.’
‘His mastery of what?’
‘He is able to travel as we do but without the need of a device, by moving Hadit with
his mind. Look, I can answer all your questions later; right now we have to move. We
can’t visit any of my usual haunts, not if we don’t want to bump into the scary
werewolves from the future again. Go and change into twenty-first century black and
put on your Sith robe. I want to be long, long ago and in a land far, far away within
the next half hour. Oh, and give me your watch, I need to reset it.’
Halcyone handed her pocket watch to Dee and went to her room. Twenty minutes
later she returned to the consulting room dressed in black walking boots, black jeans,
black T shirt, black sweater, black denim jacket and a black Sith robe Dee had bought
on ebay.
Dee awaited her, dressed in an almost identical set of clothes. He handed her back her
watch, picked up a small black briefcase and said: ‘Let’s go.’
THREE
I got a call from the office around half eight in the morning, the office being
wherever Gwen Ellis and her mobile phone happened to be. Anyone seeking to enlist
the services of Dee & Gowdie had to go through her. Gwen was secretary, gobetween, agent and manager all rolled into one. Like me, she was a Welsh speaker.
Apparently Mr Dee only employed Welsh speakers, leaving the employment of nonWelsh speakers to Mr Gowdie.
‘Bore da,’ said her incorporeal sing-song voice. ‘You have an appointment at nine
thirty.‘
‘I do? Since when?’
‘Since now, arranged on your behalf by Mr Dee himself. Your appointment is with
Mr Dee’s PA, so it must be very important.’
This news silenced me momentarily. From what I'd heard Dee’s PA only ever went
where Dee went. Was Mr Dee in Caeraber? There was no point in me asking Gwen:
the exact whereabouts of Mr Dee was classified information, above even her pay
grade.
‘Are you still there, cariad?’
‘Yes, I’m still here. Nine thirty, you say. Where?’
‘The usual place,’ she said, ending the call.
It was raining when I left the house at nine o’clock. The terrace of squat one-bedroom
houses on Joppa Street huddled together in the dull grey morning light as wet flurries
lashed their pebble-dashed and whitewashed and random stone façades. Hatless and
umbrellaless, I turned up the collar of my gumshoe trench coat and made my way
hurriedly between Smith Street's elderly two- and three-storey houses to the town
square and onwards into the walled old town nestling under the pseudoConstantinopolitan battlements of Edward Longshank’s castle.
Market Hall was a nineteenth century edifice built on one of the walled medieval
town’s original burgages, squeezed in between Pepper Lane and Palace Street. Inside
the hall shops lined the walls both on the ground floor and along the first floor gallery
overlooking it, shops which now stood mostly abandoned and empty. Rain rattled on
the skylights in the duo-pitch roof above as I entered by the back entrance from
Pepper Lane and climbed the worn wooden stairs to the gallery, where only one of its
establishments was still open for business: Caffi’r Caer, an old-style no-frills greasy
spoon where you could order a small, large or mega-sized fried breakfast. The café
was rarely full and today was no exception: a portly red-faced pensioner tucked into
his sausages, egg and baked beans, breathing noisily between each mouthful; at
another table the cook—a haggard grey woman in a grease-stained apron—chatted
nasally in Welsh with an obese teenage peroxide blonde. I bought a mug of tea,
picked up a discarded Daily Post and sat near the back of the cafe beside one of its
gallery-side windows, hiding behind the newspaper while keeping an eye out for Mr
Dee’s PA.
I was twenty minutes early but I didn’t have to wait long for the PA to arrive. He was
easy to spot: he dressed too smartly to be a local and there was no one else around for
him to blend in with. He stood at the opposite end of the atrium browsing through
some of the shelves of second hand books that were scattered around Market Hall. I
put down the newspaper, pulled out my notebook and biro and quickly scribbled four
lines of dots while focussing my attention on Mr Dee’s right-hand man and asking
myself what this meeting had in store for me. I counted the dots in each line and got a
seven, a five, a nine and an another seven: four odd numbers, which gave me Via, the
geomantic portend of a misfortune difficult to avoid, of personal enemies.
‘Fear not at all; fear neither men nor Fates, nor gods, nor anything,’ I whispered to
myself, quoting from the third chapter of The Book of the Law. The man seemed
somehow to have heard me; he froze momentarily, staring in my direction. I rose, left
the café, and walked over the creaking timbers of the gallery floor towards him.
The PA was a tall and slim middle-aged man with silver hair and a proud, patrician
face dressed in a black Armani suit. He stood motionless with his hands in his
pockets, his concentration fixed on the rows of discoloured publications before him.
When I reached him I held out my hand and said a hello. He took his hands out of his
pockets and mutely pointed at his shiny gold wristwatch without looking at me. A
quick glance at my smartphone told me that it was nine twenty-three.
Not for the first time I thought about my employers, wondering who they were and
what their agenda was. If they had one. If they existed at all. For all I knew, Mr Dee’s
PA was in fact Mr Dee himself. Time began to drag its feet. After what seemed an age
the PA looked at his watch.
‘Nine thirty precisely,’ he said in Welsh, offering me his hand. ‘Good morning, sir.
My name is Jones.’
‘Does that make me Smith?’ I quipped, shaking his hand. He had a light, almost
insubstantial grip.
‘No, sir. Smith is Mr Gowdie’s assistant.’
‘I see,’ I said.
‘This way please, sir,’ he said, letting go of my hand. He turned and started off at a
brisk pace. I followed him down the stairs and through Market Hall’s main entrance
onto a wet, reflective Palace Street. Jones turned left towards the castle.
‘Do you like the rain, sir?’ Jones asked me.
‘As a matter of fact, I do, Mr Jones.’
‘That explains the weather then,’ he smiled.
‘Excuse me?’
‘The weather. It should always conform to the will of the magician,’ he said.
At the top of Palace Street we turned right down Ditch Street, coming to a halt beside
the castle entrance.
‘They say,’ Jones said, ‘that where the castle now stands there used to be, in ancient
times, a temple sacred to Dagon, the Prince of the Depths. Perhaps that's why the
ghosts of dead sailors are said to rise from the Menai Strait to roam the streets at
night. They say that Caeraber is one of the most haunted towns in Wales and the
Marches, as haunted as the towns and villages of the Jarvis Hills and the Severn
Valley.’
‘The Jarvis Hills? The Severn Valley? I thought they were fictional locations.’
‘I can assure you, sir,’ Jones said, ‘that they’re both every bit as real as Caeraber.’
Jones is clearly an eccentric, I thought. Dagon, ghosts, the Jarvis Hills and the Severn
Valley. I felt like laughing in his face. Instead I said: ‘You seem to know a lot about
Caeraber.’
‘As I should, sir. After all, I’ve never been anywhere else.’
‘Never?’ I said, unable to hide the incredulity in my voice.
‘And what about your good self, sir?’ Jones asked. ‘No matter where you go, you
always seem to come back to Caeraber. Is that not so?’
I ignored the question, which seemed somehow offensive to me, though I could not
think why.
We walked on, turning right onto Gaol Street and Jones pointed to the courthouse on
the corner of Gaol and Ditch; a grey Graeco-Roman temple to the goddess of Anglo-
Welsh justice, the dull pomposity of its tall columned portico silenced by the size and
scale of the medieval fortification facing it.
‘This area,’ Jones said, ‘was originally known as the King’s Gardens. It has been the
sight of a succession of buildings dedicated to the administration of justice, including
a gaol that has stood here since medieval times. The buildings you now see before
you have been here since the mid-nineteenth century and reflect the architectural
designs of the age. At that time they housed both the courts and the living
accommodation for the county's judges and lawyers. The Old Gaol building next door
was once the principal office for the Caerabershire Constabulary, formed following
the Counties Police Act of 1856. It had extensive prisoner cell accommodation within
its basement, and the first floor was the location of the Chief Constable’s living
quarters and offices.’
‘Fascinating,’ I said.
‘It’s all in here,’ Jones said, producing a white booklet from the inside pocket of his
Armani jacket and handing it to me. ‘Take it,’ he said. ‘It’s yours.’
The cover of the booklet held a grey reprint of an old illustration of Caeraber. Above
it was the title:
WITHIN OLD CAERABER’S TOWN WALLS : A HISTORICAL GUIDE TO
PLACES OF INTEREST PAST AND PRESENT
‘Is this the purpose of our meeting?’ I asked. ‘For you to give me this?’
‘Goodness me, no,’ Jones chortled. ‘We shall come to that presently.’
We walked in silence down to the crossroads where Gaol Street intersected High
Street and became Church Lane. I thought about my geomantic act of divination in
the café earlier, how it had warned me of a misfortune difficult to avoid and of
personal enemies. I steeled myself for a magickal confrontation. I remembered
reading somewhere that a true magician always made the first move: the best form of
defence was offence. But Jones walked nonchalantly beside me with his hands in his
pockets, as happy and as innocent as a child. What if I was wrong? What if I
assaulted a foe who was in fact a friend? Or worse still: what if Jones was Mr Dee
himself? An attack on Mr Dee would be nothing short of suicide. Then I thought of
the words of Saint Aleister in the second chapter of The Book of the Law, verses 58
through 60:
‘Yet there are masked ones my servants: it may be that yonder beggar is a King. A
King may choose his garment as he will: there is no certain test: but a beggar cannot
hide his poverty. Beware therefore! Love all, lest perchance is a King concealed! Say
you so? Fool! If he be a King, thou canst not hurt him. Therefore strike hard & low,
and to hell with them, master!’
Perhaps this was a test. Perhaps Jones was indeed Dee and the whole purpose of this
meeting was to evaluate my judgement and abilities as a magician. Trial by Magick.
‘Here we are,’ Jones said as we reached the corner of Gaol and High, derailing my
train of thought as if to forestall any hex I might launch. ‘This is the place,’ he said,
nodding at the dirty white wall of the Mona Hotel.
We turned the corner to the left and approached the hotel’s front door.
‘We’re too early,’ I said. ‘The Mona hasn’t opened yet.’
Jones chuckled and said: ‘Nonsense, sir. There isn’t a door in Caeraber that won’t
open for us.’
As if to validate this statement, the door swung open before us. A bald man stood in
the doorway dressed in an old faded yellow rugby shirt. He had a strangely narrow
head with a flat nose and bulgy, unblinking eyes. His skin was rough and scabby and
he had creases in his neck. The sight of him made me nauseous yet I had to make a
conscious effort to stop staring in fascination at his impressive ugliness.
‘Good morning, Mr Spicer,’ Jones said jovially.
Mr Spicer shuffled to one side and gestured for us to enter. I followed Jones in and
through the musty darkness within to a windowless and unfurnished back room
warmed and illuminated by a crackling log fire burning in a large open fireplace.
Jones rubbed his hands gleefully before the flames and said over his shoulder: ‘Two
pints of your best ale if you please, Mr Spicer.’
‘So what did you want to see me about?’ I blurted out.
Jones nodded as if I’d said something he agreed with. ‘Mr Dee wishes to see you. It
concerns the moving of Hadit.’
‘Moving Hadit? I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘But you have heard of Hadit, sir?’
‘Naturally,’ I said. ‘Every Thelemite has heard of Hadit. Hadit is the point in the
centre of the circle, the axle of the wheel, the cube in the sphere, “the flame that
burns in every heart of man, and in the core of every star,” and the Thelemite’s own
inner self.’
‘Hadit is the present,’ Jones said. ‘If Nuit is the multiverse, Hadit is that moment of
multiversal spacetime which the self consciously occupies. This is why Hadit is the
centre: the centre of the universe from any individual’s point of view is always the
present. We are here right now in this room because this is where Hadit is. We are
also in the Market Hall at nine thirty in the morning, but we can no longer see that
because Hadit is no longer there as far as we’re concerned. We have followed Hadit
to a different place in Space, Time and Probability.’
‘I see,’ I said, uncertain.
‘By moving Hadit the magician is able to change his position in multiversal
spacetime. We do not need technology to travel through time. We need only master
the art of moving Hadit to where and when we want Hadit to be, rather than
following Hadit around, so to speak.’
Spicer came back with our beers, handed them over and departed again. The beer
tasted like watered-down dishwater. I looked at it in disgust. Jones downed his with
relish.
He wiped froth from his mouth and looked at his watch. ‘Mr Dee would like to see
you now, sir,’ he said. ‘This way, please.’ He led me from the room down a short
passage and then up a carpeted stairwell to a landing, stopping outside a varnished
oak door. ‘You’ll find Mr Dee in here,’ he said, then turned and went back down the
stairs.
I opened the door and stepped into a square windowless room lit by a single bulb.
The room was unfurnished and empty but for one object: a large floor-length mirror
in the far wall, its frame embossed with intricate geometric symbols.
I stepped up to the mirror and gazed at my reflection. My reflection gazed back at
me, cleared its throat and said: ‘Hello, Mr Dee.’