Doctor Illuminatus Page 13

  “Oh, you can be sure of that!” the woman responded. “Yes, indeed.”

  You can say that again, Pip thought.

  The door of the waiting room opened, and the nurse poked her head round it to survey the room.

  “Mrs. Polson?”

  The elderly woman stood up. For not more than a few seconds, Pip could smell her perfume, an overpowering mixture of orange blossom, musk and patchouli oil. But behind it, like a bitter aftertaste, was the vague smell of putrid flesh.

  The door closed after her.

  “What a pleasant lady,” Pip’s mother remarked.

  Pip was terrified. She was now certain the woman had been de Loudéac, shape-shifted into some country lady with a gift for small talk and a more than passing knowledge of witchcraft.

  “You look as if you’ve seen a ghost,” her mother said. “White as a cloud.” She patted her daughter’s hand. “Don’t worry. It’ll all be over in two shakes of a puppy-dog’s tail. And it really won’t hurt.”

  “No, Mum,” Pip replied solemnly.

  She could hardly tell her mother the truth, that the pleasant lady was a fifteenth-century alchemist who practiced the black arts and was in league with Satan and all his evil minions. Picking up a magazine, Pip tried to occupy her mind with the pictures of celebrities and their lives, but it was useless. De Loudéac was there, in the next room, having a mole removed from his back. And, she considered, wasn’t a mole a sign of witchery? Then it dawned on her that so was a wart . . .

  The door opened again and the woman came out. “Nothing to worry about, my dear,” she said as she passed Pip’s chair. “All over in two shakes of a puppy-dog’s tail.”

  Could she have heard her mother say that? Pip wondered. Had she perhaps, even from the next room, been eavesdropping on their conversation, gleaning any facts she might about Pip and her family? She watched as the woman left the waiting room, spoke briefly to the receptionist at the desk outside, then left the building.

  “Philippa Ledger?” the nurse called from the door. “Do you want me to come in with you?” Pip’s mother asked.

  “I’ll be all right, Mum.”

  Pip stood and went into the nurse’s room. It was as she had expected — a couch with a disposable paper sheet spread over it, several metal chairs, a metal desk with a white melamine surface, a stainless-steel trolley bearing several trays of surgical instruments half covered with a cloth and white cupboards on the wall. Hanging over the couch was a print of a farm scene while over the desk was a calendar advertising a drug company. The room was permeated with the overpowering smell of hospital disinfectant and medicines.

  “Sit down here, please, Philippa,” the nurse said, indicating a metal seat with an armrest attached to one side on a swivel. She studied a sheet of paper pinned to Pip’s medical-record folder. “Just a wart to come off. This won’t take long.”

  “Isn’t Dr. Oliver going to do it?” Pip asked.

  “No, the doctor was called away on an emergency. But that doesn’t matter. This is a simple procedure and I can do it. Only the doctor can remove blemishes from the face. That’s the law. But from a finger ... that can be left to a lowly nurse like me.”

  She smiled and turned to the desk, picking up a gadget that looked not unlike Pip’s father’s gas-powered blowlamp.

  “This canister,” the nurse explained, “contains liquid nitrogen gas. It is very cold indeed. What I shall do is squirt tiny little bursts of the gas on to your wart. This instantly freezes it, and then I’ll scrape it off with this . . .” she pointed to a steel instrument in a small steel dish “. . . spatula. This process is called cryosurgery.”

  Resting Pip’s hand on the armrest, palm up, she swabbed the wart with surgical alcohol and, pulling over another chair, sat next to Pip and took hold of her wrist.

  “All you’ll feel is a cold sensation. Nothing to worry about. Ready?”

  Pip gritted her teeth and nodded. The nurse put the nozzle to the wart and pressed a trigger. There was a brief fizzle. Pip felt nothing. This was repeated several times, then the nurse put aside the appliance and scraped the wart tissue off into the steel dish. Only at the end, when the base of the wart came out, did Pip wince.

  “All done,” said the nurse. “You may have a little blister form, but it’s nothing to worry about.”

  “It’s bleeding a bit,” Pip observed.

  “It will weep for a little while,” the nurse reassured her, dabbing a gauze swab on the wound and applying a bandage. “If it does, just dab on a bit of antiseptic cream and a new bandage.” She dropped the bloody swab in the dish with the scrapings of wart tissue. “Now, off you go.”

  Pip stood up and walked to the door.

  “Thank you very much,” she said, turning to the nurse as she reached the door.

  Bending over the desk, the nurse was dropping the bloody swab and wart scrapings into an envelope. This she folded and placed in the pocket of her tunic.

  “Aren’t you supposed to throw ... .” Pip began. The nurse turned. Her face was contorted, her nose flat and wrinkled like a pig’s, her eyes round and staring like those of a bird. Through her hair, one of her ears was pointed, the tip curling forward. Tufts of coarse, brindled bristles stuck out from it.

  Panicking, Pip yanked on the door. It would not open. She wrenched the knob. The latch gave and she almost fell out into the waiting room.

  “Was it that bad, darling?” her mother asked sympathetically, a worried look on her face.

  Pip, firmly closing the door behind her and gathering her wits about her, replied, “No, Mum. I tripped on the step.”

  Seven

  The Dead and the Undead

  Two candles in bronze holders burned upon the table in the center of Sebastian’s subterranean chamber. The flames glinted off the glass retorts and fractionating towers. On the shelves, the dark leather spines of his alchemical books shone like highly polished shoes.

  “De Loudéac is ready,” Sebastian announced. “But why did he steal my wart?” Pip asked. “What possible use can he have for a bit of bandage with a drop of blood on it?”

  “DNA,” Sebastian answered. “Deoxyribonucleic acid, that which constitutes the genetic matter of all living things, the building blocks of life. If he has but a small amount, he can build upon it. As you would say, clone from it. He first had your blood from the stinging butterfly, then your cells from your hair, but these seem to have been insufficient.”

  “You mean,” Pip said, horrified, “that the homunculus is me?”

  “No, Pip,” Sebastian assured her. “Not you, but it surely contains elements of you, something of your character that de Loudéac required.”

  “Such as?” Pip wanted to know and yet, at the same time, she did not.

  “Perhaps your strength of character,” Sebastian considered. “Perhaps your innocence, being, as you are in his eyes, a child. Perhaps your intelligence, which will complement another trait he has acquired elsewhere. For you see,” he finished, “he is not making a replica of any one person. He is making a composite. A creature that is a fusion of human and animal characteristics.”

  “A lamb’s heart, the Siamese cat’s fur . . .” “Precisely.”

  “But that’s unnatural!” Pip retorted. “It’s terrible.” “Indeed,” Sebastian said, “it is against all the laws of Our Lord. Yet it is what he seeks to do, for he wants what he believes will be an invincible creature, one that contains the attributes of its many components.”

  “Brave as a lion, fast as a cheetah, quick as a snake,” Tim commented.

  Sebastian nodded.

  “How can you be sure he is nearly ready?” Pip responded.

  “I can be sure,” Sebastian replied, “for tonight is a new moon and it is then that new life may be created.”

  He walked across the flagstones and, climbing the library steps, removed a small book from the top shelf. Pip and Tim moved to the table to read it over Sebastian’s shoulder.

  “This tome you may
not see,” Sebastian said, placing it on the table but not opening it. “Step back, I beg of you.”

  Somewhat offended, Pip and Tim retreated a few steps.

  “We can be counted on not to tell a secret,” Pip remarked in a pained voice.

  “This I know,” Sebastian said, “for I trust you. Yet this book contains matters not that I fear you will recount to others, but of which it is best you remain in ignorance, for your own good.”

  He turned the cover over and thumbed through a number of pages until he found what he was looking for. Slowly, his lips moving to the words, he ran his finger down the page. Tim could just see that it contained strange diagrams as well as text. When he was done, Sebastian returned the book to the shelf.

  “De Loudéac,” he said, “has to conduct a rite of conception in order to bring his homunculus fully to life. This cannot be accomplished in the town for it would draw much attention. He must find a place where he is safe from discovery, where he may channel and focus the powers of darkness.”

  “How does he do that?” Tim asked.

  “He will use his surroundings,” Sebastian explained, taking down another book and opening it at a copper-plate engraving of the interior of a church. “Consider this illustration. It shows the chancel of a twelfth-century church in Italy which, before the coming of Our Lord, Jesus Christ, was a pagan temple to the Greek god, Zeus. Notice how, behind the altar, the wall is curved, to form a semicircle. The roof above is domed. Imagine, if you can, that the walls and roof are hands, opened yet brought together as if to catch a ball. And imagine that the ball is the power you seek to bring to this place, in this case the power of the Almighty. The curve of the walls and the roof sweep this power inwards upon the altar —”

  “It’s like a satellite dish!” Tim exclaimed. “A concave shape that collects the signal and concentrates it in the middle where the receiving aerial is.”

  Sebastian opened an astronomical almanac.

  “The moon rises at eleven forty-three of the clock. That is when he will be commencing his ritual.” He looked across at Tim. “What is the hour now?”

  Tim glanced at his watch and said, “Half past three. We’ve got eight hours to find de Loudéac’s whereabouts.”

  “I think not.” Sebastian produced a long leather tube from a rack beneath the table and, twisting off the lid, let a roll of pale vellum slide into his hand. “Draw near and see this.”

  He smoothed it out on the table, weighing down the corners with books. It was nearly a meter square.

  “It’s an old map,” Pip declared.

  Unlike a modern cartographer’s map, it was as much a picture as a plan. Villages were shown as clusters of tiny houses, woods as hundreds of little trees. Marshy areas appeared covered in tufts of rushes or coarse grass, orchards as rows of trees with little red dots in them for fruit. Some fields contained primitive drawings of farm animals. On a trackway was the two-dimensional drawing of a man on horseback, not skillfully done, but as a child might, the horse’s ears pricked up, its bridle painted blue, the man riding with his feet stuck out. Intricate symbols were inked in here and there, scattered seemingly willy-nilly about the landscape.

  “More exactly,” Sebastian corrected her, “it is an alchemical map of this area. This,” he pointed to a little cluster of houses drawn in three dimensions, “is what is today Brampton. You can see here the mound upon which the castle stood. This,” he ran his finger along two meandering lines, one drawn in faded azure ink, the other brown, “is the river and this is what is now the road from Brampton to Stockwold. As you can tell from the depiction of trees, this area was once covered with forest.”

  “It might be in color,” Tim observed, “but it’s certainly no Ordinance Survey map.”

  “What is this place?” Pip asked, her finger hovering over a carefully drawn cross with curled ends to the arms.

  “Rawne Barton,” Sebastian answered, “or, to be precise, it is the Roman spring in the field. This map was compiled before my father built the house. Do you see anything else that might be of interest?”

  Side by side, Pip and Tim studied the map. It was

  Tim who finally spoke.

  “Just here,” he said, “across the river, there’s a symbol drawn. Looks like an inverted horseshoe with something else in it. What does it mean?”

  Unlike most of the other symbols, drawn in black ink, this was the color of dull brass.

  Sebastian picked up a pencil and drew an inverted U upon a piece of paper, then, within it, added a symbol:

  “Dismiss for the moment,” he instructed them, “the

  U. This circle is an ancient sign dating back thousands of years before the time of Jesus Christ. It may be found on Bronze Age carved stones. To alchemists, it is the sign of phosphorus. Are you aware of this substance?”

  “We learned about it in science,” Pip announced. “It’s really dangerous because it ignites spontaneously with air.”

  “It is the substance some alchemists called brimstone,” Sebastian added, “that from which the fires of hell are created. Thus, on the map, where you see this symbol, be assured it is a place where the power of great evil may be concentrated.”

  “What about the upside-down U?” Tim asked. “That,” Sebastian said, “is not an alchemical sign.” “So what is it?”

  “Study again the map, my friends.”

  Pip and Tim looked at the map once more, then at each other, then at Sebastian, and said in chorus, “The quarry!”

  At ten o’clock, Pip told her parents she was tired and went up to her room. Ten minutes later, Tim said he thought he would turn in now too. Fifteen minutes after that, in the gathering summer dusk, they emerged from the coach house with Sebastian, wearing dark-colored clothes and soft-soled sneakers. Tim carried his father’s black Maglite, a hefty halogen flashlight that took six batteries and was the size and weight of a policeman’s club. Sebastian had armed himself with a small T-shaped piece of metal in which, at the point where the upright met the crossbar, was set a smooth, cloudy crystal.

  “I suppose,” Tim said as they set off through the long grass of the meadow, “that’s a magic wand of some sort.”

  “In a manner of speaking,” Sebastian replied. “I personally do not believe in the efficacy of wands. They are more the invention of writers of stories than genuine alchemical tools. This item has an actual practical use.”

  “What exactly is it, then?” Pip asked.

  “It is an alchemical divining rod,” Sebastian told her, “in the shape of the true cross. If I were to hold it by each end of the bar, the long section would bend upward if it encountered goodness, downward if wickedness.”

  “A bit like those birch sticks that dowsers use.” “Yes, save that their rods discover water and are made of wood, whilst this is made of gold.”

  “Gold!” Tim exclaimed. “Solid?”

  “No, the center is of silver, but this is plated with gold.”

  “What about the stone set in it?” Pip said.

  “It is of quartz,” Sebastian replied. “It is called the eye of God for it sees righteousness and condemns wrong.”

  As they came near the river, they stopped talking. When they reached the bank downstream of the Garden of Eden, they turned and followed the river for about half a mile, leaving the grounds of Rawne Barton and making their way through the neighboring fields. Eventually, they reached a gravel track that crossed the river by a rusty iron girder bridge. Welded into the floor of the bridge were two rows of protruding bolts.

  “This was a railway line,” Sebastian explained, keeping his voice low. “It was closed many years since.”

  Once over the river, they found a track branching off from the former railway line, clearly a spur running towards the quarry. Some way along this, Sebastian stopped.

  “From here,” he said, “we shall climb to the top of the quarry. It is imperative we are silent. On such a still evening, sound will travel easily.”

  They entere
d a wood, the ground rising gradually at first, then, after a few hundred meters, more sharply. It was not easy going. They had to watch out for loose stones and dry twigs. When Tim stepped on one, it cracked like a pistol shot, drawing a scowl from both Pip and Sebastian. It took them half an hour of climbing to reach the top of the cliff.

  The drop was greater than it looked from below, at least fifty meters. The rock face was broken in a few places by ledges but it was otherwise smooth. Lying on their stomachs, for safety as much as to keep hidden, they elbowed themselves forward until they could just see over the rim. The sky was clear and although the new moon had not yet risen there was sufficient starlight to see below.

  In the clearing beneath the cliff were the hippies’ bus and van. Where the Moonbeamers had had their hearth, another fire was burning, the thin smoke rising on drafts of hot air up the cliff face. It smelled sweetish, a delicate incense.

  “Apple wood,” Sebastian hissed. “To purify the air.” The door of the bus opened, a figure stepped out and the door swung shut behind it. Standing close to the vehicle, it gazed around itself before stepping towards the fire. As it approached the glimmer of the flames, Tim realized it was the old bookseller. He was wearing a black cape.

  “De Loudéac!” Sebastian whispered.

  Once more, the bus door opened and another figure appeared. It did not, however, follow de Loudéac to the fire but moved around the clearing, keeping to the shadows. Its movements were slow, hesitant.

  “Is that . . .” Pip was not sure how to refer to the homunculus, “. . . it?”

  “No,” Sebastian answered. “That will not move until de Loudéac instills the force of life within it. What you see,” he added, “is either Beelzebub or one of his infernal servants.”

  “Beelzebub?” Tim repeated.

  “The Lord of Darkness,” Sebastian murmured. “He whom they call Satan.”

  De Loudéac threw something into the fire. There was a sharp flash of brilliant light from the fire that momentarily illuminated the trees.

  “Magnesium powder,” Sebastian said. “It is beginning, we must move.”