Alchemist

  The wind caterwauled around him; it carried voices, foreign tongues, strange sounds, chants. It lifted the Englishman up, sent him tumbling across the floor, lifted him again, dropped him, gashing his head on the stone chair. He groped the floor wildly with his hands.

  Stay inside the pentacle.

  The instruction, had to obey the instruction, the first rule. He felt for the lines carved into the floor; the floor heaved, shook, tipped him sideways.

  Then there was complete silence.

  He lay still. The wind had gone completely. There was nothing now, nothing at all except for bitumen blackness and the silence.

  Somewhere a light flared. He smelled the smoky warmth of burning paraffin. Flickering lights on the walls, growing in number, in intensity. He looked behind him: a row of lit torches stretched the full two hundred yards’ width of the cave. He could see the silhouettes behind them but not the faces. There was no need to see the faces; many he already knew; the others, in time, he would meet.

  He turned to look at the goatherd and the goat. He saw the frayed fronds of the snapped tether first; then one of the goat’s hooves and a section of the leg. Beside it lay two human arms torn off at the elbow, the fingers interlinked as if in a final gesture of prayer; they were partly covered in a ragged strip of bloodstained cloth. A coil of the goat’s intestines glistened in a slimy heap on the floor near them.

  He saw a human foot, then the goatherd’s head and the top part of his torso crudely severed at the breastbone; close beside lay the head of the animal severed at the neck and tilted at an angle, with one ear raised as if cocked to listen. Blood, strips of flesh, fragments of organs lay scattered across the floor and adhered to the walls as if hurled by an explosion.

  The silence seemed as if it would last for ever.

  It was broken finally by the old man’s voice; the old man they had carried here on the stretcher. He spoke in sure, quiet tones filled with the authority he had held for so many years:

  Nema. Olam a son arebil des

  Menoitatnet ni sacudni son en te.

  Sirtson subirotibed

  Summittimid son te tucis

  Artson atibed sibon ettimid te

  Eidoh sibon ad

  Munaiditouq murtson menap

  Arret ni te oleac ni

  Tucis aut satnulov taif

  Muut munger tainevda

  Muut nemon rutecifitcnas

  Sileac ni se iuq

  Retson retap.

  Hail the new emperor of the Grand Grimoire!

  The Englishman bided his time before replying. He stood up, restored himself in his chair, and sat facing away from the torch lights and out into the night. He breathed in slowly and deeply, filling his lungs so that his voice would carry, then braced himself: ‘Hail Satan,’ he said.

  The echo came back in unison: ‘Hail Satan!’

  1

  Reading, England. November, 1993

  Only one of them would survive. They raced through the darkness, guided solely by instincts handed down through three billion years. And each of them had less intelligence than a clockwork toy.

  Just one survivor out of sixty-five million. Strength would have something to do with it but mostly it would be luck. The right place at the right time. Like life itself.

  Sixty-five million wiggling, tadpole-like creatures inside a soup of chemicals, ejaculated into the woman, freed and doomed simultaneously. Ripples of contraction joined with their own efforts and propelled them forward in tiny tramlines through the mucus, at a rate of one inch every eight minutes, up towards the uterus. Each elbowed the next, as they fought their way through the prickly follicles of hair that blocked their path and which entwined them like tentacles, some getting no further. The rest moved on, propelled by a primal urgency they were not equipped to understand, and with no concept of what failure meant.

  Unaware of the turmoil deep inside her own body, Sarah Johnson stared up at her husband’s face in the glow of the bedside light and smiled. ‘Don’t move,’ she said. ‘Stay there, it feels so good.’ She reached up and kissed him.

  He kissed her back then softly nuzzled her ear. ‘How was it?’

  ‘Nice.’

  ‘Just nice?’ he said, a little flatly.

  ‘Very nice,’ she said, and kissed his upper lip.

  ‘That’s all?’

  ‘The earth moved,’ she said teasingly.

  ‘Not the whole universe?’

  ‘I think the whole universe probably moved too,’ she said quietly. She felt him contract and she clenched him with her muscles, trying to hold him there for longer. Their eyes danced with each other. They had been married for four years and were still wildly in love.

  She pulled her fingers through his thick, wavy hair, her heart still racing; he expanded then contracted a fraction inside her and fresh aftershocks of pleasure resonated through her. She breathed deeply, the pounding in her heart only slowly beginning to subside.

  ‘God, I love you so much, Sarah,’ he said.

  ‘I love you too,’ she said.

  Over sixty-four million of the sperm were dead now, but most of them still carried on with their journey, travelling as fast as the ones that were still alive, propelled like flotsam on a riptide by the contractions of the uterine muscle.

  A mere three thousand were still living when they reached the mouth of the Fallopian tube. A further two thousand died, either crushed, asphyxiated, or exhausted in the next inch of the journey. One solitary sperm, alive and healthy, finally reached the egg ahead of the rest.

  From its mouth it spat an enzyme that acted like a paralysing anaesthetic on the cells surrounding the egg, enabling it to push them apart. From its feet it excreted a glue that enabled it to bond to the outer zone of the egg. Then it began to tunnel through the heavily protected protein shell. Finally it reached the egg inside and began to fuse with it.

  The sperm’s task was nearly over. Its long, stringy tail dropped off and was discarded. The sperm’s nucleus entered the egg and within minutes the egg had begun to divide. The sperm and the nucleus each carried twenty-three chromosomes – a half set. Each chromosome carried between 50,000 to 100,000 genes, which carried between them three billion units of DNA. Like all eggs, this one contained an X chromosome. The sperm contained a Y.

  By the time Sarah Johnson had fallen asleep, she was pregnant with a baby boy. Neither she nor her husband, Alan, had any forebodings that night. They had no way of knowing then, as they lay in each other’s arms, that the child they yearned for so much would kill her without ever having spoken a word.

  2

  Georgetown, Washington. September, 1994

  The bird hung motionless in the sky above the small boy, its wings outstretched, as if suspended by invisible threads. Slowly, like the blades of a helicopter, it began to rotate on its own axis: a giant, black predator scouring the landscape beneath it for quarry.

  Suddenly it side-slipped, as if the threads had been severed, stopped and steadied for one fleeting moment; then it began to zigzag downwards, half flying, half plummeting, like a shadow chasing itself, its wings flapping clumsily as if they were clawing the air.

  Seconds later it alighted on the ground only a few yards from where he stood, with a thud. Its head jerked sharply up, and seemed to stare straight at him in surprise.

  The boy stared back for a moment in sheer disbelief. ‘DAAAADDDDDDYYYYYYY!’ he screamed. ‘DAAAADDDDYYYY! DAAADDDYYYY! DAAADDDYYYY! DAAADDDYYYY! DAAAA –’

  ‘Honey, it’s OK, honey. Mummy’s here, your mummy’s here!’

  Then the face of the bird dissolved into bright light.

  Silence.

  Conor Molloy opened his eyes, stared up at the glow of the pearl bulb in its familiar plain shade. Then he saw the bookshelves lined with his old comics, annuals, children’s encyclopaedias, his tiny microscope …

  The room was as he had left it a decade and a half ago; the same flimsy curtains, the dull red carpet, the white chest of drawers. The bed he
now lay in was the same bed that he had outgrown some time in his teens, but which had never been changed.

  ‘Conor, you all right?’

  His mother’s face was peering at him anxiously, her slender fingers glinting with the base metals of far too many rings, and in an instant nothing had changed. Fifteen years, more, were stripped away like bedclothes. He was a child again, a small boy saved from a nightmare by his mother.

  ‘Honey, darling, are you all right?’

  He swallowed the lump that was in his throat and nodded.

  ‘You were hollering your head off.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘The dream? Was it the dream?’

  He was quiet for a moment, wondering whether to admit it, aware of the rebuke it would bring once more. But he knew there was no point in trying to hide anything from her, she could always see through him. She could read the inside of his head as clearly as if it were beaming out to her from a television screen. ‘Yes,’ he said.

  She was fifty-six and still beautiful. Her long dark hair was flecked with occasional grey strands, but they looked more like highlights than age. Her blue eyes were still set in a fine classical face, barely different from the one that he had seen staring out from the host of mail-order catalogues and magazine ads she kept crammed away in a cupboard.

  However much she might have embarrassed him as a child with her strange behaviour in front of his friends, he looked at her now and knew that he had never ceased loving her. He admired her for all that she had given him as a mother.

  ‘You want to go back to sleep or you want a drink?’ she asked.

  Conor glanced at his watch; it was ten past three. But tomorrow was the last day he would see her for a long time. ‘A drink would be good, Mom. Sorry to wake you.’

  ‘You didn’t – I haven’t been to sleep.’

  He slipped out of bed and pulled on his dressing gown. As he padded towards the kitchen he heard the kettle starting to boil and smelled the sweet smoke of a freshly lit cigarette. The ranch-style house had grown in keeping with his mother’s prosperity over the years. It had started as a modest bungalow in an area that just qualified for a Georgetown address. Appearances had meant a lot to his father – he preferred to live in a small property with a good address, rather than a larger house elsewhere. His father’d had strong, intractable views on pretty well everything.

  His mother made some herbal tea, ignoring the fact that Conor loathed the stuff, then took it through to the old living room that was now only used when his mother was frightened about something. In his early childhood, the room had been a conventional family centrepiece. But over the years his mother had changed it dramatically. She had had the walls and the ceiling panelled in oak, giving it a rather claustrophobic air that was further enhanced by two of the walls being covered floor to ceiling in bookshelves – packed solid with occult reference works and grimoires. Also arranged along the shelves, making access to some of the books tricky, was a vast assortment of rock crystals fashioned into bizarre shapes, and eerie bronze and stone gargoyles.

  Heavy crimson drapes, permanently drawn, kept the outside world at bay. Two Burmese cats sat like sentinels either side of a gas coal fire in a crenellated hearth. This was kept burning, along with two joss sticks, day and night, all year round. A massive woven pentagram hung on the wall directly above the fire, flanked on each side by two tall black candles.

  His mother had eased herself into one of the two comfortable sofas and sat serene in her long black robe. Behind her was the small wooden table where she had done her sittings. A crystal ball, a small glass pyramid and several other artefacts were laid there. On the far wall a row of voodoo masks stared menacingly down on to her computer workstation, from which in less affluent times she posted occult news on to the Internet, gave tarot readings by fax and eMail, and communicated messages for psychic healing.

  A locked door between the two walls of bookshelves led into her inner chamber, where she had conducted her seances and practised ritual magic. Conor had never been permitted inside the room; and although frequently as a child he had stood with his ear pressed to the door, he had never heard anything other than meaningless chanting.

  His mother drew hard on her cigarette and blew the smoke at the panelled ceiling, which was covered in carved occult symbols. ‘Conor, I know you say your mind’s made up, but I want you to reconsider one more time. I’ve lost too much in my life. I don’t want to lose you.’

  ‘You’re not losing me – I’m at the end of a phone, we can eMail each other every day – and I’m going to be just a plane ride away.’

  ‘You know what I mean,’ she said, her tone becoming sharper.

  He said nothing.

  ‘You just don’t know what you’re getting into. Maybe I’ve taught you too much, given you false confidence. Believe me, I’ve seen it for myself, I’ve experienced what they can do. Think again while you still have the chance.’

  ‘Mom, I’m going.’

  ‘You don’t have to go. There are other companies – right here –’

  ‘Mom! We’ve had this out a thousand times. I have to do this.’

  ‘You’re as stubborn as your father.’

  ‘I’m his son,’ he said simply.

  3

  London, October, 1993

  ‘What you have to realize is that in the past one hundred and fifty years the pharmaceutical industry has gone from selling snake oil to controlling the future of the human race. The problem is, it’s still run by the snake-oil salesmen.’

  Oh Christ, Montana Bannerman thought, staring at the television monitor up above her.

  ‘Thieving, unscrupulous bastards, the whole lot of them!’ Her father thumped the coffee table, and the female interviewer beside him looked a little flustered.

  Dr Bannerman was a giant of a man in every way; both physically tall and powerfully built, and a towering genius in science. But with his bald dome rising from a mane of greying hair, his semi-permanent rig of denims, Chelsea boots and a checked lumberjack shirt, he looked more like an ageing rock star than a molecular biologist.

  Monty had tried to stop her father from drinking before he’d gone on air, but he had gulped down two large whiskies in the Sky News hospitality suite and he was now in full flood. The Rastafarian leader of the Afro-Caribbean rap group which was due on next nodded his head in enthusiasm. ‘He’s right! The man is right! Wow, is he right!’

  Monty smiled politely through gritted teeth. Her father was not doing much right now to endear himself to the pharmaceutical establishment on whom he depended for his funding. On whom they both depended.

  ‘Don’t you think, Dr Bannerman, that the pharmaceutical industry has made human life very much more comfortable? It’s eliminated an enormous amount of pain, it’s eradicated or brought under control countless previously incurable diseases. How do you argue against that?’

  ‘All that is a by-product. The pharmaceutical industry is interested in one thing and one thing only: profit. If it happens to help a few people on the way, fine, so be it.’

  ‘And that’s what you really believe?’ the interviewer said.

  ‘That’s what I was told, verbatim, by the chief executive of one of our largest pharmaceutical companies when I was a young research student. All this do-gooding stuff is crap. Look at the Nobel Prize. Alfred Nobel made his fortune out of inventing dynamite. He followed that by establishing an annual prize for peace. How much more cynical can you get?’

  ‘If that’s the way you feel, why did you accept a Nobel Prize for Chemistry?’

  ‘Sometimes I wish I hadn’t.’ Bannerman shrugged his shoulders. ‘I’m afraid in my line of work we have to be whores, selling ourselves to anyone prepared to put up cash for the next three years’ funding.’ He smiled and the true warmth of the man fleetingly shone through the storm cloud of his expression. ‘Nobel Prizes make good calling cards.’

  Plug the book, Daddy! Monty thought, staring at the fat hardback that lay
on the table, angled at the camera but out of focus. That’s why you’re there – to plug the book – not to slag off the pharmaceutical establishment!

  The interviewer shifted position and leaned closer towards him. She was about the same age as herself, Monty thought, late twenties, a pretty brunette with hair in a neat bob and a businesslike suit. The tone of her voice emphasized the change of subject.

  ‘You are the first molecular biologist to have cracked the secret of switching on and off human genes. This has been acclaimed by the scientific world as one of the most important breakthroughs of all time. Up until now scientists have been able to identify certain genes, those related to disease and ageing, but they’ve not been able to do anything about them. None of the gene-therapy attempts with cystic fibrosis sufferers, for example, have yet totally succeeded. In your position most scientists might have tried to keep their work secret, but you’ve refused to patent your discoveries and have published them for all the world to see in your new book, The Gene Bomb – The 21st Century Holocaust.’

  The camera zoomed in on the jacket. Good girl! Monty thought.

  ‘Why have you done that, Dr Bannerman?’

  His voice was big and deep, with a slight Transatlantic accent, reflecting his obsession with Americana. ‘Because no one has the right to patent human life by patenting genes. Genes will ultimately give scientists absolute control over life, but who will control the scientists?’ He thumped his fist hard on the table again. ‘Not governments – they’ll be bought off. No, it’s going to be the pharmaceutical industry. An industry so secretive they don’t even allow you in the door. Is that because they’re worried about you stealing their secrets? No! They’re worried you might find out how much money they’re all making, and how much money they’re paying out as baksheesh. Did you know that in 1988 the top eighteen US pharmaceutical companies paid out one hundred and sixty-five million dollars in bribes to doctors?’