The Watchtower

realized this sort of vulnerability could occur.
    “Sir Dee, can you provide me with proof—or at least evidence—that this process is going to be successful before I hand over these objects to you, however temporarily? They’re not my property. I need to return them to my beloved.”
    “Ah, the beatific Marguerite,” Dee said, as if he’d forgotten about her. “I’m sure she will be overjoyed to have her possessions returned. Your solicitousness about them, and her, is to be admired. But, no, if you want to make a point of it, you can’t have ‘evidence’ or ‘proof.’ The transaction belongs to a realm in which such concepts don’t exist. On one side of your decision is the great John Dee with his impeccable intellect and moral grandeur, and the ecstasy that will be yours spending eternity with Marguerite. On the other side is a sniveling coward’s surrender to weakness. I cannot make the choice for you, Hughes. I can say which choice I think you’re going to make, given your sound judgment, your physical beauty that suggests a moral one as well, in fact your magnetic presence sitting here before me now.”
    A glitter came into Dee’s gaze that made Will uncomfortable. “I could be wrong about your choice. In that case please withdraw from me before I cast your pestilence into the sea. But I hope I am right. It is up to you. I await your judgment.” The glitter in Dee’s eyes subsided into something else more subdued, more remote. A less acute longing? Will couldn’t tell.
    Still uncertain, he relaxed his possessiveness about the satchel enough to lay it on a cushion to his side. Dee remained several paces away at the opposite wall. Will then took the ring out of his pocket and held it up before him in the dim candlelight, looking at it as if the duration of his gaze could ensure its power. At one angle the stone appeared blank, but then tilted to another angle the design appeared. A tower. Perhaps this tower. Perhaps Marguerite’s ring had been leading him to this very tower … to this fate. Surely that was a sign.
    He looked up from the ring and was startled to find Dee’s face only inches from his own, his amber eyes riveted on the ring. Dee’s hand was stretched out, his long, yellowish fingernails nearly touching it. Will shrank back from the avarice in Dee’s eyes and the man’s clawlike hand, clutching after the ring in Will’s fist. But then why had he come if not to relinquish the ring and the box into the wizard’s hands? He was unwilling to return to Marguerite still a mortal. He would have to trust Dee.
    He handed the box over to him first, then the ring. Dee touched a pattern of concentric circles on the box with one of his long fingernails. In the flickering candlelight the lines seemed to move … they were moving. They began to revolve in circles like a model of Ptolemy’s universe that Will’s science tutor used to bore him with. Faster and faster, like a whirlpool, so fast that looking at them began to make Will dizzy. He wrenched his eyes away and saw that the whirlpool effect was not limited to the lid of the box. The air above the box was moving in the same circular motion, the disturbance expanding outward in a reverse conical shape that picked up the papers on Dee’s desk and tossed them into the wind like autumn leaves before a storm …
    A storm that had spread to the sea. The water outside was now thrashing, as if in response to the maelstrom raging here in the tower room. Dee carefully placed the box on the windowsill, lifted the lid, and lowered the ring into the box. He chanted a string of Latin words out of which Will, never the best Latin scholar, caught only vita and perpetua. Perpetual life. Yes, that’s what he had come for, he reassured himself, even as he began to feel an oppressive, stifling sense of being crushed in the room, a sort of airless panic. Perhaps the storm was sucking air out into its vortex. This claustrophobic breathlessness tempted Will to flee room and tower immediately, without box and ring. But a moment’s glance outside dissuaded him.
    A flash of silver light leaped from the box, streaked across the water, and struck the tower on the island off the coast. In response, a silver beam emanated from the tower, lighting a path back across the ocean. In the unearthly light, Will could see that the ocean was boiling like an evil witch’s potion. A long, low moan issued from the depths of the ocean.
    “He has awoken,” Dee