Hands grabbed at Blackwood. Dee and Talbot, pulling at him. Ripping at his clothes, trying to shake him free.

The pain, having traveled up his arm to his shoulder and spread like a plague down his midsection to his legs, reached a crescendo. Blackwood’s hand sprang open, releasing the crystal sphere, which dropped to the floor with the weight of a ball of lead.

The interior cracked but the globe held its shape. At once the sickly green emanant energy began to fade. The vision before him, the unnatural messenger from beyond, was grabbed by the swirling cyclone in the room, caught up in it, whipped around and around until it came apart, disappearing into the swirl of papers and mist.

Blackwood simultaneously felt the grip of extraordinary agony and a complete numbness—as though every limb had been cut away but he still experienced their pain. He fell next to the cracked orbuculum on the floor and suffered fits of convulsion, his body not coming to rest until the tempest in the philosopher’s library spun out to nothing.

The history of barrister Hugo Blackwood ended on that day. His accounts were settled, but his property fell into disrepair over time and eventually was considered abandoned. The home, believed by some to be haunted, was razed; its exact location is now unknown, only its proximity to John Dee’s address in Mortlake is known today. Both the parish register in Mortlake and Blackwood’s gravestone are lost to history.

A pall was cast over Dee’s own house and his career. Within the year, he had locked up his home, setting out rather mysteriously for Bohemia with Edward Talbot. Over the next six years, the two occultists led a nomadic existence, traveling abroad throughout Central Europe, Dee writing books and still attempting to communicate with angels…even as occult practices fell out of favor with the aristocracy, and the general public soon followed, unpersuaded by his florid accounts of magical entities.

It is not known why Dee remained in exile for so long. After splitting with Talbot, he finally returned to England in 1589, only to find that his home in Mortlake had been broken into and vandalized. His famed library had been looted in his absence, his rare books on the occult and unnatural practices stolen, along with his instruments for divining and spellcasting. His deep scholarship of necromancy and the supernatural arts was believed lost. What few possessions he had remaining, he sold off, piece by piece, living his final years in poverty in the same decaying mansion. The once-renowned astronomer, geographer, mathematician, royal court adviser, and occult philosopher died in Mortlake at the age of eighty-two.

Chapter

Odessa sat in the spacious backseat of the Rolls-Royce Phantom, Mr. Lusk at the wheel, Hugo Blackwood sitting at her side, motoring through Queens. The bank branch was not far east of the hospital, on the other side of Flushing Meadows Park, on 108th Street.