'Look.' Charlie shifted in his seat. 'This is probably making no sense. Let me start from the beginning.' He coughed.
'Let's go back sixteen hundred years to the Library of Alexandria. A great scholar, who was also the Chief Librarian, was a woman named Hypatia. Npw
Hypatia was quite a gaclass="underline" not only was she one of the most knowledgeable people of the time, but she caused great controversy by rejecting much of the newfangled Christianity that was sweeping across the world. She was viewed as a heretic and was eventually flayed alive by a group of oh-so-pious Christians.' Charlie smirked.
'Hypatia was an adept of the occult. A millennium after her time she would have been called a white witch. In her keeping were some of the most important artefacts known to civilisation. In her library she kept rare manuscripts that dealt with all aspects of the occult, both black and white magic, and she had in her possession the two greatest alchemical treasures known to humankind — the emerald tablet and the ruby sphere.
'The emerald tablet is famous, of course. Over the centuries it's become established as the central pillar of alchemical law. It offers the alchemist a sort of "instruction manual" for their work. Less well known is the ruby sphere. Rumours about this object have circulated in the Hermetic world since Hypatia's time, but few have seen it and fewer still have any idea what power it contains.
'The night the Library of Alexandria was destroyed, on 13 March AD 415, Hypatia made sure that the emerald tablet was taken from the city and transported to Europe, where it was protected by a line of alchemists stretching down the centuries. Meanwhile, she made safe the ruby sphere in a secret hiding place within the foundations of the library. A year later, her father Ecumenius retrieved the precious thing and brought it to England. There he was met by the leaders of a small group of adepts who called themselves the Guardians, a group whose secrets derived from Ancient Egypt and the first alchemists, and in whose arts Hypatia and Ecumenius had been trained.
The Guardians hid the ruby sphere in a secret vault to which the only access was via an underground labyrinth. They built this close to their meeting place and ensured that the only ones who could pass through the labyrinth were those who possessed the secret knowledge needed to succeed in completing a series of tests. Almost a thousand years later, the city of Oxford grew up on this site.
'The ruby sphere remained in its hiding place until the seventeenth century when Christopher Wren was commissioned to build the Sheldonian Theatre. He discovered the labyrinth, but did nothing about it. However, a couple of decades later Isaac Newton, perhaps the greatest alchemist of his or indeed any age, stumbled across the vital clues about how to find the sphere from a document that had passed through the hands of another alchemist a couple of centuries before him, a man named George Ripley.'
Charlie leaned back in the chair and blew smoke towards the camera.
'This was almost a disaster. The sphere possesses genuinely awesome power and Newton was a genius, obsessed with elucidating the secrets of the universe at whatever cost. With the sphere, he had the chance to fulfil his dream.'
Charlie paused for a moment and stubbed out his cigarette. 'I suppose you're wondering what all the fuss is about? What's so special about this ruby sphere? Why is it so important that people would give their lives to protect it? Murder to possess it? Well, the sphere is the key to finding the Philosopher's Stone and the Elixir of Life, the ultimate dream of the alchemist. No one really knows who made the sphere. It is at least as old as the early Egyptian civilisation and some have speculated that originally it's not from this world. By reading an incantation which is inscribed as one continuous coil around the surface of the sphere, the adept can call upon the Devil to turn the lifeless contents of the crucible into the mythical and most cherished Stone.
'Now, I wouldn't blame you, Laura, if you think this is all a load of crap. But whether or not you believe the ruby sphere can be used to conjure up the Devil, there are those who really do believe, and today, in Oxford, a group of powerful alchemists are trying to prove it. They don't have the sphere, but they do possess some of the secrets they need.
'And I imagine you're trying to figure out what the link is between Isaac Newton in the seventeenth century and this group in the twenty-first. Perhaps you're wondering why I've given you a copy of Newton's secret encoded work, and you must also be trying to understand what I have to do with all this, and why my life is in danger.
'Newton, you see, was the forebear of the present-day group. He called his cabal the Order of the Black Sphinx. This was the name originally used by the early Egyptian alchemists who first used the sphere. He formed what has been called an Unholy Trinity with his lover, the medic Nicolas Fatio du Duillier, and their mutual acquaintance, James Boyle, the younger brother of the great Robert Boyle. The link between Newton and his friends and the present Order of the Black Sphinx is the conjunction of the planets. Newton found a way to obtain the ruby sphere about eighteen months before a five-body conjunction in 1690. The next time the conjunction occurred Professor Milliner had acquired some of the secret lore of the Order and tried his hand. Today, the Order are trying to repeat Newton's experiment.
'And what is this experiment? I'm assuming you have worked that out. The ruby sphere tells the adept to gather five organs, each to be taken from a young woman at precisely documented times. In place of each organ a metal coin is left, an Ancient Egyptian Arkhanon depicting five women — the five victims. These organs are preserved and used at a preordained hour. Placed on the points of the pentagram, they are central to the enactment of a ceremony which, if successful, will call upon the Devil to appear and to impart the secret of how to create the Philosopher's Stone.
'Newton and his friends succeeded in gathering the organs after murdering five young women in Oxford. The organs — a heart, a brain, a pair of kidneys, a gall bladder and a liver — were preserved according to the techniques passed down by the original members of the Order, Egyptian alchemists skilled in the art of mummification and preservation. This was du Duillier's speciality. He had made a detailed study of the processes and had done his best to duplicate the ancient techniques. The ritual was to take place in a chamber beneath the Bodleian Library — a part of the labyrinth of the Guardians. Newton and his friends reached this chamber through a hidden entrance in the wine cellars of Hertford College, close to the Bodleian. It was vital to complete the tests created by the Guardians of the fifth century, but they could do this relatively easily because Newton had the information handed down to him in the manuscript written by George Ripley. It was only thanks to the intervention of the Guardians in the nick of time that Newton was thwarted.
'From what I've learned of them, the existence of the Guardians is even more secret than that of the Order of the Black Sphinx, and they have been more successful — up until now. In Newton's time, the Guardians were led by Robert Boyle. . Yes, ironic, isn't it, that James was a key figure in Newton's group. Robert Boyle was helped by Newton's great rival Robert Hooke and a man named John Wickins, who had been Newton's closest associate, his roommate, a man who had been planted in Cambridge as a young student, specifically to keep an eye on Newton.'
Charlie peered intently at the camera. 'The present-day Order of the Black Sphinx is behind the murders of the young women in Oxford. Their members include a trained killer, a man known only as the Acolyte. They are gathering organs and preserving them, and this time they have twenty-first-century technology at their disposal. Their intention is the same as Newton's and Milliner's — to perform an occult ritual when Mars, Venus and Jupiter are in conjunction with the sun and the moon. This will occur on 31 March, the day after tomorrow, at 1.34 a.m.