Alchemist

  The cap of the bottle had been removed.

  He saw to his utter terror that the chemical inside was gushing out, seemed to be gathering pace and hurtling at him with the speed and force of a fire hose.

  It struck him full in the face and chest, with a sharp stinging sensation on his cheeks that momentarily made him cry out, before he began to contort, clutching at his face, the stinging turning to searing agony as the molecules of the acid began ripping the proteins of his skin apart, burning away the pupils and irises of his eyes, stripping off his lips, dissolving his protective clothes.

  Monty heard the faint warbling of an alarm as she stepped out of the lift on the sixth floor. She had been cursing herself for oversleeping – she never ever overslept and did not understand how she could have done so today – and had driven like a lunatic on the frosty roads all the way here. She should have got out of bed the moment the alarm went, she knew, but she had tried to snatch a few more precious seconds of doze, and instead had fallen asleep again. Jake was not going to be at all happy with her.

  She stopped in her tracks beside the empty security desk and glanced fleetingly at the blank closed-circuit monitors, listening. Definitely an alarm. She pushed her smart-card and punched in her pin number, then opened the door; immediately she could hear the alarm warbling more loudly, and could see a red flashing light outside the end laboratory opposite Jake’s office.

  She launched herself forwards, sprinting down to the lab door and peered through the glass. She could see nothing. Quickly she inserted her card, punched in the code and pushed the door open.

  As she did, burning, acrid fumes engulfed her, stinging her eyes, searing her throat and lungs, and she coughed, called out for Jake Seals, tore her shawl from around her neck and held it over her nose, then went on in.

  For a moment, through unprotected eyes, she could see nothing out of order. Then she heard a hideous, yelping sound that shook every nerve in her body; it reminded her of a dying dog she had once found, its entire rear half crushed flat by a truck. It had died in agony in her arms.

  ‘Mr Seals?’ she shouted, then coughed violently again as the awful fumes choked her. Crouching low, she stepped a few paces into the laboratory. ‘Mr Seals?’ The alarm warbled fiercely above her head. There was a sharp, caustic reek in the air that seared her nostrils and the back of her throat.

  Something moved in front of her. She stepped a few paces nearer and called out again, her feet crunching on broken glass. Then her voice dried as she was suddenly able to see the apparition in front of her more clearly. A whinnying scream got trapped in her gullet.

  A human form, recognizable as Jake Seals only by the few strands of long brown hair that still hung from one side of his smoking cranium, and by his cowboy boots, was lying on the floor beyond the work benches. He was writhing like a dying snake beneath the massive chromium head of the emergency shower, alternatively groaning and yelping in pain.

  His face was a featureless mass of black, smouldering pulp; it was changing shape even as she watched, small sections of skin sloughing off and dropping to the tiled floor.

  She backed away, mouthed his name silently, tried to say something to let him know she was there, but her mind was momentarily paralysed by shock. Water for burns, she thought, staring at the shower. Water was OK for some things, but not for others. What the hell did he have on him? Acid? Water was OK for acid, diluted it.

  ‘Jake, my God, what is it, what’s on you?’

  A pitiful incoherent cry emitted from his melting face. It twisted towards her and a gap opened where his mouth should have been and made a sound.

  She stared back. ‘Wolf? Did you say wolf?’

  ‘Wolllffff.’ The sound faded into a dull moan.

  ‘What do you mean? Is it some chemical?’

  He gave out another dull moan, then a sudden, ghastly screech of pain.

  She had no idea what he meant, and there was no time to keep on asking. She gripped the massive ring pull. Thoughts skidded wildly through her brain. She tried to calm down, to recall a first aid course she had been on a decade back, tried to remember what the elderly district nurse had told them about chemical burns. Water. You had to dilute with water. She yanked the handle sharply down and a million clear droplets hurtled instantly from a nozzle the size of a dinner plate.

  They struck Jake Seals with an eruption of steam as if a boiler had exploded. She heard an agonized shriek, then Jake disappeared completely inside a densening cloud that was turning a vile greeny-yellow colour.

  As the water gushed down, the cloud became denser, more choking, spreading outwards, engulfing her too. Monty stepped back quickly, scared and useless, too shaken to think straight. Must not breathe it in. Stared at the gushing water, unsure whether it was making things better or worse. She coughed; her eyes were watering with tears. Then she heard a hollow frothing sound; it was coming from inside her own chest. She remembered what Jake had told her.

  It dissolves flesh and absorbs into the blood stream simultaneously, causing almost instant internal haemorrhaging and destroying the lungs.

  Panicking, she backed away further, turned, raced down to a phone on the far wall, grabbed the receiver. She was having to fight for air now, heard strange noises in her throat, felt her lungs tightening inside her chest. Closing down. They were closing down on her. Her vision was blurred and she could barely see the numbers on the buttons. Getting harder still to breathe. A friend at school had nearly died from an asthma attack because she had forgotten her inhaler. Monty had never forgotten the sight of her lying on the tarmac of the playground, clawing at the air, hissing like a punctured tyre. It was happening to her now; her throat was constricting, her lungs would not work, would not draw anything in.

  She pushed her face right up against the buttons, punched out 9–9–9, her ears ringing with the gurgling inside her own chest which almost drowned out Jake’s hideous screams. She had to cover her ear with one hand in order to hear the emergency operator’s voice as she struggled to stay upright, to stay conscious. Have to keep breathing, she thought as she crashed down on to the hard, tiled floor.

  27

  Barnet, North London. 1946

  ‘It died.’

  The pet shop owner gave the small boy a withering stare, dug his hands firmly into the pockets of his brown overalls, pursed his lips and ran his tongue along the inside of his gums. It was the standard defensive stance he adopted when confronted by irate elderly ladies complaining that their cats would not eat the new food he had persuaded them to buy. ‘Healthy enough when it left here, it was.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘Did you give it water straight away when you got home, like I told you?’

  ‘Yes,’ Daniel Judd said quietly.

  ‘And you took it out of the shoebox and put it in a proper cage?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You gave it food?’

  Daniel nodded solemnly.

  The man studied him closely. He looked a decent enough kid, neatly dressed, well spoken, timid; not the type to maltreat an animal, although he wasn’t too bothered about what happened to rabbits after they left here. Dull, beastly little things that would give you a sharp bite if you gave ’em half a chance, could never see the point in them, except they were popular with kids. And there were a dozen different reasons why they would die spontaneously when they were babies. No resistance, that was the real problem.

  Now chameleons, for instance. They were different. A chameleon was a pet worth having. Except, he thought glumly, he hadn’t seen one at a wholesaler’s since before the war. Hitler had a lot to answer for. No bananas and no chameleons. ‘Suppose you’ll need another shoebox?’ he said grudgingly.

  The boy proffered a sixpenny bit and looked back at him hopefully. ‘Please, sir.’

  The man softened at the word sir. Respect. He liked a bit of respect; he had begun to notice faint beginnings of a decline in respect ever since the war.

  Daniel understood about respect. He knew that the best way t
o get what you wanted from an adult was to proffer respect. It made them feel important.

  ‘Nothing wrong with her,’ Dr Hawksworth had declared. ‘Perhaps a touch of migraine, but nothing to worry about.’

  Daniel had listened outside his parents’ door.

  ‘Like a knife, Doctor,’ his mother had said. ‘It was like someone had stuck a knife in my head and twisted the blade. I felt sick, giddy.’

  ‘I prayed to the Lord for her,’ his father interjected.

  ‘And how do you feel now, Mrs Judd?’

  ‘All queasy, shaking all over. God’s wrath for something. He knows our sins. He punishes us in His own way.’

  ‘You have classic migraine symptoms, I’m afraid, Mrs Judd. Have you been under much tension recently?’

  ‘Doctor, when you have a child as impure in heart as Daniel, you are under strain all the time. We have to save his soul from eternal damnation before it’s too late. He tests me, Doctor, he tests us both so hard. The Lord is punishing us for bringing him into this world the way he is. It was a difficult birth, you remember, don’t you? How he nearly killed me then?’

  ‘I’ll give you a couple of tablets to take now, help you go to sleep, and I’ll write out a prescription for your husband to get in the morning. Stay in bed tomorrow and try to rest your mind.’

  Daniel had hovered on the landing as Dr Hawksworth, tall and bendy with his droopy moustache, emerged from the bedroom with his father.

  ‘And how are you, young fellow?’ he had asked.

  ‘He’s fine,’ his father had answered for him.

  ‘Glad to hear it.’

  ‘Dr Hawksworth, I think you should know that my wife has never had a migraine before in her life.’

  ‘There’s always a first time for everything, Mr Judd.’

  Daniel had crept back into his room before the doctor left, and checked once more that everything was tidied away. He had been scrupulously careful. But even so, tonight, a month later, the faintest trace of the pentacle he had chalked on the carpet was still just visible to his eye when he looked hard enough, which made re-drawing it easier now.

  He had no way of knowing whether it was anything more than coincidence with his mother. Just lucky timing that she had got her bad head whilst he was doing the spell? In his mind, he had come to believe that was all it was. Yet he continued to nurture a spark of hope that somehow the magic really worked. Tonight he would find out.

  There was one big mistake he had made with his magic workings during the spell he had tried to cast on his mother. He had found this out afterwards when he had read through the grimoire again: he should not have kept going in and out of the circle. Once he had entered the circle, he should have closed it and conducted all the workings inside it until he had finished. He would not make the same mistake again tonight.

  He flashed his torch at the large round clock on the shelf. 11.15. There was a good waning moon, and it was a fine, clear sky. Perfect. It had been too scary, keeping the rabbit concealed for three days last time; he was better organized now.

  He tiptoed to his door, opened it gradually, and listened for any sounds from his parents’ room. Silence. Just the steady tick of the long-case clock in the hall. Then he began his preparations.

  As before, he laid his bedspread, then his dressing gown, along the bottom of his bedroom door to blot out the light, then draped the black cloth over the table by the window, and placed the black candle on top. From the back of his wardrobe he removed a sock he had taken from his father’s drawer – the grimoire said that any item of clothing was suitable – and a photograph of Mr Judd wearing a bowler hat, which he had slipped out of the family album.

  At midnight he undressed, lit the candle and began the ritual. He repeated exactly the words and the procedures he had used a month ago, completing the ritual by drawing a circle on his father’s sock with the rabbit’s blood, then an inverted cross on his forehead in the photograph. He hissed the portentous words once more, loudly and venomously:

  ‘Be damned! Be damned!

  My power is cursing you,

  My power is hexing you,

  You are completely under my spell.

  Be damned! Be damned!’

  He stepped back into the middle of the chalk and salt circle, closed it with his ceremonial sword, then shut his eyes tightly and concentrated. He tuned everything out of his mind except the image of his father’s thin face, hard as iron, above his starched white collar and his correctly knotted, mean little tie.

  Silence.

  Nothing was happening.

  He repeated the words of the curse again, hissing them even more loudly. Then he listened hard. But there was no sound anywhere in the house.

  Daniel remained inside the circle for an age. The grimoire said that the power of the spell kept its strength as long as he remained inside the circle. After a while he began to feel freezing, but made no attempt to leave the circle and put his pyjamas back on. His legs began to ache and his body sagged with tiredness. He sneezed, catching his nose and stifling it as best he could.

  Finally, at 2.15 in the morning, he was too tired to stand any longer, so he squatted down inside the circle, tucked his legs under him and, lolling his head forward, lapsed into a doze.

  At 3.00, exhausted and frozen, he gave up. Despondently, he blew out the candle and began to tidy away the objects. He would bury the rabbit in the garden tomorrow when his mother went out to her church coffee morning, and he would put his father’s sock into a neighbour’s dustbin. The candle and the black cloth he would keep; the candle had taken a lot of work to make and maybe he would try again soon. Perhaps he should have changed the spell? Maybe there was a different one for a man?

  But most likely, he knew, as he lapsed into a gloomy and troubled sleep, it had never worked at all, and never would. You had to be a magician to make it work. And now God was really angry at him for what he had done.

  He was jolted awake by the sound of his door crashing open and banging against the wall. Bright daylight flooded into the room. Overslept, was his first immediately guilty thought, as he saw his mother’s demented face looming over him, her hair loose, hanging long and wiry like a witch’s, her eyes bloodshot and blurred with tears.

  Something was wrong, but he did not know what. Frightened, he instinctively withdrew his hands from under the bedclothes, clasped them in front of his face to commence his morning prayers and to ward off her first blow. He closed his eyes again, tightly, bracing himself.

  But there was no harsh slap across the face. And for a moment no sound either. Then his mother began to scream hysterically.

  ‘Dead! He’s deeaaaadddd! Daniel … Daniel … your father! Oh God! He woke up about midnight with a terrible headache. He took aspirin, just aspirin. I can’t move him, can’t wake him, he’s cold, son. God has taken him. God is punishing us for your sins. Please, Daniel, help me wake him!’

  28

  London. Wednesday 9 November, 1994

  Conor decided the only way to get through his workload was to start coming into the office much earlier in the mornings, and continue through until late at night.

  At a quarter to seven, as he drove bleary-eyed up the Euston Road, listening to Michael Heseltine under attack on a news programme, trying to get a handle on British politics, he saw a blaze of strobing blue lights ahead. As he got nearer, he saw two fire tenders and a saloon car with a blue light outside the Bendix building. A small knot of firemen were standing on the pavement, chatting. Conor could see no sign of any urgency as he turned right and pulled up by one of the security guards’ windows in front of the barrier.

  He had seen this particular guard, a dour man in his mid-thirties, a good dozen times in the past three weeks, but there was no hint of acknowledgement or greeting as Conor showed him his pass card.

  ‘What’s happened?’ Conor asked.

  ‘Chemical spillage,’ he said, as if it were a routine occurrence.

  ‘Where?’

  ??
?In one of the labs,’ the guard added dismissively, opening the barrier and curtly signalling him through.

  Conor parked in his space and climbed out. Even in the low grey morning light he could see the grime on the BMW’s paintwork and wheels and made a mental note to take it to a wash tonight if possible, mindful of the penalty otherwise. He walked to the front entrance of the building, curious to find out more about what had happened.

  The entrance atrium had its normal quiet, early-morning feel in spite of the presence of a uniformed fire officer and a senior-looking police officer in conversation by the security desk. A man carrying a briefcase was stepping into a lift. Conor glanced at the solitary security guard on duty and was pleased to see it was the most friendly of the five regulars.

  He was a sickly-looking black man whose face, beneath a grizzle of greying hair, had begun to shrivel, prematurely, into hard walnut-like wrinkles. It was difficult to put an age on him – somewhere between mid-fifties and sixties, Conor guessed. The name on his lapel badge said: ‘W. Smith. Lobby Security.’

  As Conor showed him his card, he asked quietly: ‘There’s been some kind of accident?’

  The guard nodded. Conor noticed a sadness in the man’s yellowing eyes. ‘Yes, sir, there’s been a chemical spill, sir.’ The voice was courteous and servile, but its owner did not look anxious to say any more.

  ‘What kind of spill?’

  ‘I don’t know that, sir. It’s up on the sixth floor, sir.’

  ‘Anyone hurt?’

  A hesitation then a nod. ‘Mr Seals, the Chief Lab Technician. He’s very bad – I don’t think –’ W. Smith halted, uneasily, in mid-sentence. ‘Ambulance took the young lady as well. I don’t know how she was. The fumes, they said.’

  ‘Young lady?’

  ‘She’s very nice. Come here with her father – he’s very famous. Dr Bannerman. Won the Nobel.’

  Conor felt as if a bucket of cold water had been swilled into his guts. ‘Miss Bannerman? She’s hurt? You don’t know how bad?’