The door opened outward. It was more of a storage room than a bedroom, but inside there was a bed, set against the far wall, upon which a thin mattress lay with no bedclothes. Upon the mattress lay a small body, a boy, turned toward the back wall. Medium-weight chains ran from padlocked loops around the iron bed-frame rails to manacles around the boy’s wrists and ankles. Blood stained the foot of the mattress from his apparent struggles against the ankle cuffs, his skin there raw, his feet swollen to a man’s size.
The sight of the manacles set Solomon’s mind racing. They looked like slave chains from a century ago.
He noticed now that the air inside the windowless room was different. There was a changed atmosphere inside here altogether, like an airplane cabin that had been depressurized. He heard a dull, distant sound that was a cross between ringing and roaring, similar to what he heard after a long afternoon training at the FBI Academy shooting range. But it was more than that. He felt disoriented, light-headed. If his brain were a radio, he’d suspect its reception was somehow being jammed.
All this was forgotten when the boy turned to him. The chains rubbed against the bed frame, iron against iron, and the shirtless boy raised his head slightly, fixing his eyes on Solomon. His eyes. They were steely, almost silver, maybe blue. And wide with madness. The young boy’s face was twisted and contorted like an old leather glove worn by a too-large hand. Solomon trembled.
The boy’s mouth opened, and stayed open, on the verge of speech, for what seemed a long time. Just when Solomon believed no sound would come out of it, his dry lips spoke.
“Blackwood.”
The voice was faraway, hushed, rawed by many days of mad bellowing. Solomon was shaken, breathing fast and in distress at the sight of this ill boy. Blackwood? Maybe he had heard the word wrong.
The boy’s eyes bored into him. Solomon recalled the tales his grandfather used to tell, growing up in Illinois, about sailors and merchant mariners he had known in his years at sea who had explored uncharted islands and were lured by exotic women and promises of wealth and magic, only to get mixed up in dark rites. In one awful tale, he and his crew had to leave behind a cabinmate who had attacked them in the night after becoming possessed by a demon.
Indeed, this sharecropper’s son appeared to Solomon for all the world to be inhabited by some force of evil beyond the jurisdiction of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Before Solomon could speak, the boy’s mouth opened again. His tongue was as black as a corpse’s. Again, Solomon hung on the words that would come from this black tongue.
“Blackwood.”
Was Solomon hearing him correctly?
“What?” asked Solomon, his parched voice nearly a croak.
“Bring Blackwood here.”
Overwhelmed and terrified, the fears of his childhood surging back into consciousness with fresh life, Solomon began backing out of the room. His left shoulder struck the door frame, and Solomon shuddered as though he had been attacked. He felt his way back through the frame and into the narrow hall, needing to get out of the room to collect himself.
“Hugo Blackwood. Here.”
Solomon somehow got the door closed. The strange name meant nothing to him. He stood there with his chest and shoulders heaving, trying to get breath.
When he turned, he found four young children in the hallway staring at him. Coleman stood farthest away, his crackers finished, his hands hanging empty.
“What happened to him?” asked Solomon.
The children just stared. They didn’t know.
“Who…who is Hugo Blackwood?” Solomon managed to ask.
The children had no answer for him. One by one, they turned and walked away.
The answer, however, was forthcoming.
1582. Mortlake, Greater London.
The house by the river at Mortlake, with its many rooms of varying disciplines and moods, was itself an articulation of the great sorcerer’s mind.
Its hallways were cool, quiet, contemplative. This door opened to the observatory, the ceiling paned with glass for charting celestial events in service of both astronomy and astrology. Another door opened to a laboratory of navigation and charting, cartography a burgeoning scientific discipline crucial to English mariners who hoped to develop trade routes to Cathay or even the New World, mastering the northern seas. Another door led to a laboratory of cosmography, the study of the universe known and surmised, elements of which—astronomy, geography, geometry—enhanced various other scientific pursuits behind other heavy doors.
A palace of the mind.
No room was more treasured, more hallowed, than the great library. Its contents were the envy of all of Britain, its breadth greater than any university. Shelves and stacks of tomes collected from throughout the educated world: the basal ganglia of the house. Cicero’s De Legibus, Cardano’s Libelli Quinque, The Opera by Arnaldus de Villanova, and many incunabula—some four thousand arcane volumes of similar import arranged in a system peculiar to, and only fully understood by, their curator: the occult philosopher and British royal adviser John Dee.
In the middle of his sixth decade of life, Dee was famed as Queen Elizabeth’s court astrologer, spymaster, and scientist, an influencer of the highest order. He had been entrusted with divining and selecting the date of her coronation, and for twenty years had enjoyed an exalted consultancy in the highest circles of London life. Recently, however, his political patronage had suffered due to a number of disappointing prophecies and rejected imperial recommendations. His mathematical studies continued to be praised and supported, but the world was changing around him. Every scientific advance in the sixteenth century was accompanied by a proportionate diminution of elemental magic.
This schism in the disciplines of science and magic resulted in his diminished influence within court circles and affected the patronage he had come to rely upon—that had, to state a fact, funded his Mortlake manor and subsidized the acquisitions both scholarly and esoteric that made his mind-castle the envy of all of Britain. Purposefully, and perhaps a bit desperately, Dee had of late turned more fully toward an exploration of the supernatural.
His aim was to repair the schism of science and magic, to bridge this divide through the practice of alchemy and divination. He sought an audience with experts in this realm: He sought communion with none other than angels.
This unorthodox pursuit had introduced Dee to an underground league of occultists and spirit mediums. After consulting various mystics who claimed to be in contact with higher realms, he partnered with Edward Talbot, whose real name was Edward Kelley but was using the pseudonym after a conviction for forgery a few years before. Both of Talbot’s ears had been removed by a magistrate as punishment for that crime, which was why Talbot wore a monk’s skullcap even indoors. Dee, however, overlooked all of Talbot’s past indiscretions, so enamored was he with the quality of Talbot’s spiritual consultation and the breadth of his knowledge of the uncanny arts, specifically his talent as a scryer.
“We must begin,” said Dee. “This is the most auspicious time, Edward…”
Talbot stood now in the center of the great library, his psychic attention focused darkly upon an orbuculum resting in the smooth, cupped palm of a bronze casting of a human hand. The crystal ball was flawless, a perfectly smooth sphere lit from below by three votive candles, giving it the appearance of illumination from within. John Dee wore his customary white gown, his silken white beard falling beneath his mustache in a perfect V, looking like a wizard immersed in a spellcasting. Talbot was deep in a trance, incanting in a language revealed to him and John Dee exclusively by Enochian angels.