ONE

      So intent was Frank upon solving the puzzle of Lemarchand’s box that he didn’t hear the great bell begin to ring. The device had been constructed by a master craftsman, and the riddle was this – that though he’d been told the box contained wonders, there simply seemed to be no way into it; no clue on any of its six black lacquered faces as to the whereabouts of the pressure points that would disengage one piece of this three-dimensional jigsaw from another.

      Frank had seen similar puzzles – mostly in Hong Kong, products of the Chinese taste for making metaphysics of hard wood – but to the acuity and technical genius of the Chinese the Frenchman had brought a perverse logic that was entirely his own. If there was a system to the puzzle, Frank had failed to find it. Only after several hours of trial and error did a chance juxtaposition of thumbs, middle and last fingers bear fruit; an almost imperceptible click, and then – victory! – a segment of the box slid out from beside its neighbours.

      There were two revelations.

      The first, that the interior surfaces were brilliantly polished. Frank’s reflection – distorted, fragmented – skated across the lacquer. The second, that Lemarchand, who had been in his time a maker of singing birds, had constructed the box so that opening it tripped a musical mechanism, which began to tinkle a short rondo of sublime banality.

      Encouraged by his success, Frank proceeded to work on the box more feverishly, quickly finding fresh alignments of fluted slot and oiled peg which in their turn revealed further intricacies. And with each solution – each new half twist, or pull – a further melodic element was brought into play – the tune counter-pointed and developed until the initial caprice was all but lost in ornamentation.

      At some point in his labours, the bell had begun to ring – a steady sombre tolling. He had not heard it, at least not consciously. But when the puzzle was almost finished – the mirrored innards of the box unknitted – he became aware that his stomach churned so violently at the sound of the bell it might have been ringing half a lifetime.

      He looked up from his work. For a few moments he supposed the noise to be coming from somewhere in the street outside – but he rapidly dismissed that notion. It had been almost midnight before he’d begun to work at the bird-maker’s box; several hours had gone by – hours he would not have remembered passing but for the evidence of his watch – since then. There was no church in the city – however desperate for adherents – that would ring a summoning bell at such an hour.

      No. The sound was coming from somewhere much more distant, through the very door (as yet invisible) which Lemarchand’s miraculous box had been constructed to open. Everything that Kircher, who had sold him the box, had promised of it was true! He was on the threshold of a new world; a province infinitely far from the room in which he sat.

      Infinitely far, yet now, suddenly near.

      The thought had made his breath quick. He had anticipated this moment so keenly; planned with every wit he possessed this rending of the veil. In moments they would be here – the ones Kircher had called the Cenobites, theologians of the Order of the Gash. Summoned from their experiments in the higher reaches of pleasure, to bring their ageless heads into a world of rain and failure.

      He had worked ceaselessly in the preceding week to prepare the room for them. The bare boards had been meticulously scrubbed and strewn with petals. Upon the west wall he had set up a kind of altar to them, decorated with an assortment of placatory offerings Kircher had assured him would nurture their good offices: bones, bonbons, needles. A jug of his urine – the product of seven days’ collection – stood on the left of the altar, should they require some spontaneous gesture of self-defilement. On the right, a plate of doves’ heads, which Kircher had also advised him to have on hand.

      He had left no part of the invocation ritual unobserved. No Cardinal, eager for the fisherman’s shoes, could have been more diligent.

      But now, as the sound of the bell became louder, drowning out the music box, he was afraid.

      Too late, he murmured to himself, hoping to quell his rising fear. Lemarchand’s device was undone; the final trick had been turned. There was no time left for prevarication or regret. Besides, hadn’t he risked both life and sanity to make his unveiling possible? The doorway was even now opening to pleasures no more