I opened the front door and stepped into the incense-filled shop. The interior was long and narrow, with old, creaky shelves bulging with boxes and books, reaching to the ceiling on either side. The place felt and smelled like an attic, stuffed with a mix of mysterious treasures and worthless relics.
A man stood behind the counter. His age fell somewhere between 20 and 40, with a face that was boyish, yet spottily bearded. His tiny wire-rimmed spectacles made him appear both scholarly and deranged. A baggy cardigan dwarfed his narrow shoulders and emphasised his hunched posture. From the pallor of his skin, I assumed that he saw as little of the sun as possible.
“Can I help you?”
I glanced around to make sure we were alone and approached the counter. “This is 413 Vina del Mar, right?” the man nodded. I thought back to the final e-mail message I’d received. “There are ears everywhere.”
My new acquaintance squinted his eyes at me and pursed his lips solemnly. “Wait here.”
He hurried to the front door and locked it. Then he leaned into the display window and flipped over the Open sign. Finally, he pulled down a shade to cover the door, leaving the room very dark. With a businesslike stride, he turned and brushed past me, heading toward a door at the back of the shop. “This way.”
I followed him into a back room, eerily lit by an aquarium, a lava lamp, and a half dozen candles. The smell of incense was strong. My New Age guide motioned for me to sit down. I sat on a solid oak chair with a spiderweb design in the backrest. My arm rested on a heavy wooden table covered with dusty tomes, yellowed documents, and splodges of candle wax. Maybe while I was here, I’d try to make contact with my Great-Aunt Rita and see what she’d done with my X MEN comic books.
“What’s your name?”
“Murphy. What’s yours?”
“Ellis. Archie Ellis. Here is one of my cards. Do you have one?”
I reached into my overcoat and pulled out a wad of business cards. Finally finding one of my own, I handed it over to Mr Ellis. As he looked it over, I checked out the card he tossed in front of me. Archibald Ellis. UFOlogist… Mystic… Occult Expert… Licensed Tarot Card Reader…Numerologist. I looked up, thinking of what Lucas Pernell had said about wheat and chaff. This guy struck me as a loony tune, but Malloy had been in contact with him. And he was still my only lead.
Ellis finished examining my card and looked up. “So, you’re a PI.”
I extended my hand across the table. “Good to meet you, Mr Ellis.”
His handshake was aggressive. “Call me Archie.”
“Okay, Archie. Let’s talk about Malloy.”
“Tell me what you know.”
I spent the next fifteen minutes giving Archie a quick overview of what had happened. None of the principal players names were mentioned (and I referred to the NSA as an unnamed federal agency), but Archie didn’t seem to mind. He soaked up everything I said. My story continued up to the point from where I found the e-mail address. Ellis leaned back and pressed his fingertips together.
“Would you like some herbal tea?”
Only if I were in the middle of a desert, dying of dehydration. “No thank you.”
Archie pressed his church steeple hands against his lips, lost in thought. I waited patiently. “You said that you have two boxes.”
I nodded and pulled out my smokes. Archie’s cool facade evaporated in horror as his eyes caught sight of my Lucky Strikes. “I don’t allow any smoking in my shop. Sorry.”
Looking peevishly at the smouldering trays of incense, I reluctantly replaced the pack. Damn health nuts. I couldn’t wait to find out what this Bozo knew, then get out of his New Age little shop of horrors.
“I’ve got two boxes, both of which came from Malloy.”
Ellis leaned back in his chair. “Small, right? Made of a strange material… no way to open them?”
I confirmed with a slight nod. “You’ve seen them.”
“I had one.”
It was hard to believe that Malloy would have entrusted something important to this crackpot, but he seemed to know what he was talking about. “What do you mean you had one?”
“It was stolen, along with a disk I recorded during my interview with Malloy.”
Three or four questions came into my mind at once. First, the box. “When did this happen?”
“Six days ago.”
“Go on.”
Ellis obviously felt stupid admitting that the box had been taken from him. “I’d only gotten the box the day before. Malloy had mentioned boxes during our interview, so I assumed that he was the one who’d sent it. There was no letter with it, no return address. I hid it here in the back room. The next evening, I came in here just after I opened the shop, and someone had broken him. The only things missing were the box and one of the interview discs. I tried to contact Malloy but couldn’t get through to him. Since then, I haven’t left the shop.”
“Tell me about the interview with Malloy.”
Ellis seemed relieved to change the subject of the box. “I publish a magazine called the Cosmic Connection. Maybe you’ve heard of it.”
I nodded, vaguely remembering that Fitzpatrick had mentioned it. Ellis was pleased. “Well then, you know we have feature articles, investigative reports, and interviews, all concerning the supernatural, particularly all things extraterrestrial. I have contacts throughout the field of UFOlogy, one of whom is a man named Elijah Witt. He’s a legend among those of us who study alien encounters.”
The name didn’t sound familiar.
“Mr Witt and I have corresponded for some time. Maybe six months ago, he wrote and said that a friend of his, Thomas Malloy, was coming to town and that I should hook up with him. Actually, Malloy contacted me.”
“Do you know what he was doing here?”
“Well, Mr Witt was a professor at Berkeley for decades. He still has honorary status, though he’s retired and lives in seclusion in the north-west. Anyway, he pulled some strings and got Malloy use of research lab at the University.”
“What was Malloy working on?”
Ellis shrugged. “He wouldn’t go into a lot of detail, but he did use a strange term: the Pandora Device. I have no idea what it means.”
Fitzpatrick said that he’d tracked Malloy to a nearby university. If Ellis’ information was reliable, then I could assume that Malloy was at Berkeley creating, or working on, something called the Pandora Device. I shifted in my seat.
“What else did Malloy tell you?”
“Well, he talked about Roswell, of course. Actually, I still have that part of the interview.”
“I thought you said it was stolen.”
Ellis got up and walked toward an old wooden cabinet. “It was a long interview. I filled up an entire disk. After I started a second disk, we only talked for another five minutes or so. The first disk was stolen with the box. Luckily, the other disc was still in the video recorder, which I’d taken home with me. I was going to publish a transcript of the interview in my magazine, but having the disk stolen ruined that plan.”
He looked through the cabinet for a moment, then pulled out a disk in a blind sleeve. “This is it. You want to look at it?”
It didn’t sound like there was much to see on the disk, but I wasn’t about to jump to conclusions. A laser disc player sat on a nearby shelf. Ellis clicked it on and slid in the disk. A moment later, Malloy’s face appeared on the screen. Ellis’ recorded voice came from off camera.
“Sorry for the interruption,” Ellis’ voice said. “You were saying…”
“As you know,” Malloy continued, “the Roswell Complex has been shut down for years. Most people don’t know that a tremendous amount of alien equipment and technology was, and still is, stored there.”