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.

Chapter

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.