Chapter Four
Alex

"The Man in the Crystal Tower" by
The Plasma Miasma

     Alexander Horowitz looked into the mirror. Lines, lines, lines. My, what time had wrought upon him with its cold talons. But that was fine. He had lived and learned enough for three lifetimes already; actually, he looked quite youthful, considering.
     Grimalkin jumped off of the altar table and onto the floor, then turned his head to look up at Alexander, to see if he would follow. He uttered a querulous "miaow", then turned and strode off into the kitchen.
     "No time for a snack, Grimalkin," Alex whispered in his raspy voice. "Much work to do."
     Suddenly Grimalkin was back before him on the altar. No strange powers accounted for this teleportational feat; merely the natural, though equally mysterious, abilities possessed by all felines. "Ahh, my little familiar," he addressed the cat face to face, "Would that I had half of your sinister grace! I could then work my wiles directly, rather than afar. I would appear as from nowhere, twitch my tail and disappear as silently and suddenly as I came. And I could grab the ends of this mad circle with my claws and pull it together as though it were made from strands of yarn."
     Grimalkin looked at him with the skeptical, half-disgusted expression that was his "default face". He stood posed next to a statue of Bubastis, Egyptian God of Cats, and the resemblance was remarkable, save for Grimalkin's tabby markings. His pedigree reflected more of alley cat than of Egyptian royalty.
     "Pass me that Keptar stone, would you?"
     The cat reached out with a paw and batted a small, flat, pentagonal jade-green stone across the flat polished surface of the altar. It came at him so fast that Alex had to reach out with his own five-fingered paw to catch the stone before it flew off the edge. He looked over at the cat with an arched eyebrow. "I told you, we'll eat after we're finished! This shouldn't take long." Grimalkin's expression said that he had no idea to what Alex was referring, but that he was perfectly content to wait all night if he had to. He lifted his batting paw and began to groom it.
     Alexander Horowitz held the Keptar stone in his hand, silently marveling at the patterns that light traced upon it, the striations of pale white that ran through the green rock, the almost-visible etched figure that had been so carefully constructed upon the semi-transparent stone that it looked almost like a hologram, though of course such a thing was impossible on a stone so many thousands of decades old. No, the serpent-limbed creature that seemed to stare out at him from inside the green stone had not been carved by prehistoric Von Daniken lasers; the true process was much more low-tech. But so much more profound.
     Alchemy.
     He placed the stone in an empty slot on a contraption that sat on the altar before him, a strange -looking conglomeration of pendula and pulleys, gears, wheels, and levers. He passed his hands in the air three times before it, each in the opposite direction from the other. The words he spoke were strange and guttural, seemingly quite unlike most languages familiar to modern man. When he finished speaking, he folded his hands across his chest and bowed his head.
     After a pause, he reached to the opposite end of the altar and picked up a small engraved wooden box. After a pass with his left hand, he flipped the lid open with both thumbs and forefingers and withdrew an object wrapped in a strip of black velvet. With solemn and deliberate motions he unwrapped the velvet, revealing a stone of similar size and dimension as the first Keptar stone. The green of the rock was darker, however, and the picture it contained was far more disturbing.
     "Ahhh, Grimalkin, what a spectacular creation this is! It would have been worth the its cost for its aesthetic value alone, let alone its mystic power."
     Grimalkin was predictably noncommittal.
     Alex stared at the stone for a moment longer, savouring the craftsmanship that had created the figure etched upon it, the savage jaws, the reptilian eyes, the fevered intensity of the muscles of the face. A face so terrifying, so entrenched with evil could have had no earthly origin; yet for all that it was so distinctly human. He broke contact with the gaze of those cold lizard eyes and reached through the network of pulleys in order to place the stone in the slot reserved for it. He made the passes and spoke the words, then waited.
     The machine began to move.
     Only slightly, at first; one gear began to turn, one pulley to tug. But it picked up speed rapidly, and soon wheels were spinning, cables were running through pulleys, gears were churning. The whole construction began to glow eerily. And in the center, amidst the maelstrom of undulating metal, the Keptar stones began to turn, one clockwise, the other counter.
     Alexander Horowitz watched the stones turn; he felt the magic growing. Three times he had performed this operation; there would need to be seven more. "Wheels must turn," he said aloud, "Circles must close. Draw, draw together, my wonderful machine, draw together the figures that must dance in this mad, mad puppet theater.