Alchemy of Glass

by Barbara Barnett

  His eyes drifted closed as sleep descended, he hoped for the last time. The vortex of the next high tide would propel his lifeless body, then, into the waiting peace of a deep-sea grave. Awareness faded into the ceaseless rhythm of the tides, transporting him on the wings of time.

  CHAPTER 4

  Silence. Ominous, like the void in the eye of a hurricane when the sky is clear, but for the creep of a scarlet-tinged black cumulonimbus mustering on the horizon, planning its attack of death and destruction. Strange, almost pastoral. The quiet before a flock of panicked birds flee into the sky ahead of any human understanding that catastrophe is but a moment away.

  July 1916, it had been, an hour before dawn. Gaelan had been there too long, on this field of death. The distorted ground was strangely uneven, almost alive with movement, just beneath their feet as they moved, always forward. An eerie sensation as they marched above the invisible graves of the Somme. Soldiers whose names would be ever unknown, their bones crushed with each step into white powder, mixing with the quicklime that lined each grave. Inches beneath their boots, buried in the clay, forging a treacherous path for the still living.

  The dawn light glinted off the mud and mingled with blood and flesh and the dull gleam of cannon fodder dotting the entropy of the battlefield, too distant to be heard. And with the dawn had come the renewed bedlam of war. The endless procession of good lads swarming like rodents catapulted over the top of the trench, pushed forward, endlessly forward, only to fall like so many dominoes: green and red, not black and white.

  “Keep moving.” The commander whispered over and over. “Do not bloody stop.” Until the next trench. The acrid scent of gunpowder and mass graves covered with lime burned his eyes, his nostrils. Hell’s perfume at the banks of the River Styx.

  Gaelan was vaguely aware he was dreaming. A flash of memory a century old.

  The silence broke, replaced by the soft tinkling of glass . . . wind chimes? Sprites in his ear. The atonal elegance of the notes lacked cohesion yet vibrated distantly through his head. The high strings of a harp randomly plucked, sustained, note blending into note, enough to rouse him to full wakefulness.

  Gaelan groaned, casting off the final remnants of the dream. His joints cracked satisfyingly as he stretched. His arm was better; his ribs no longer throbbed with every slightest motion. He was warm and dry. Comfortable. Evidently, some time had passed since he’d taken the poison—enough for his injuries to heal, but how long? And he was no longer, as far as he could discern, in the sea cave.

  Was this death? He didn’t feel dead, but would he know? Or was this yet another dream? A dream within a dream?

  In the blank blackness, the constant tlink . . . tlink . . . tlink of the wind chimes began to grate. Definitely not the sea cave.

  Tentacles of panic slithered along his spine. Think, man. Assess your situation.

  Fact: you are flat on your back in a cot. No pillow. No sheet. You can move but not see. You are in a twisty little maze . . . An amusing memory from the most ancient of old-school computer games. Good old “Adventure.” But this was no game. This was a puzzle decidedly real.

  The moist air pressed down on him, heavy like bricks. A familiar mustiness and windowless closeness of the air reminded of prison. Was he being held captive? But where? And why?

  Gaelan’s imagination, fueled by too-vivid memories of his imprisonment in Bedlam nearly two centuries earlier, manifested before him in a tableau of rusty knives and scalpels, tongs and hand-saws—the disembodied tools of Dr. Francis Handley’s torture. Five years of infinite cruelty. Until the day the mad doctor severed Gaelan’s fingers one by one—an “experiment” to see if they might grow back. They hadn’t. He blinked away the vision.

  But this was not Bedlam, not Newgate prison, not any other cell Gaelan had been unlucky enough to inhabit. There had to be a logical explanation.

  The simplest explanation, Mr. Occam, is that the poison is taking its bloody time and is having quite the jolly time screwing with my mind. Ensnaring it in some sort of lucid dream. A Sartre-esque hell.

  Well, there was no exit discernable, at least not from Gaelan’s vantage on the bed. In the pitch black of wherever this was. L’enfer, c’est les autres. But no other people around to hold up that eternal mirror to his damned soul. Fuck Sartre.

  Working theory: this is real, I’m actually awake, and somehow not where I was before I blacked out. Further, the poison did not work, for reasons yet to be determined. But what went wrong with the poison? And how to fix it, make it right.

  Those damnable wind chimes shattered any small shred of concentration he still possessed. He needed to find them, and crush the fuckers to sand. No time like the present. One more stretch and Gaelan sat on the edge of the bed.

  Socks. How the devil had socks got on his feet? Thick woolen socks, warm and quite comfortable. But where the devil were his sandals? If only he could see . . . anything.

  Gaelan seriously needed a smoke. Patting down his jeans and shirt he remembered this was not his clothing. Yet, there in the shirt pocket, a pack of fags. Not his brand, but . . . ah, well . . . At least they weren’t soaked in brine. Damp, but worth a try.

  More patting. This time for matches. But the box was a sopping mess of wet cardboard and sticks. He had no working lighter. And where the fuck was his wallet? Desperate, he struck the first match. Nothing, not even a spark.

  Six more futile attempts, before he gave up.

  Bloody fag probably wouldn’t burn anyway.

  He pitched the pack and the matches into the black, listening, waiting for them to hit a wall, the floor, anything that might make a sound besides that infernal tinkling. Help him gauge the size and shape of the room. Might as well have cast them into a black hole.

  He sighed, resigned to simply wait out whatever this all was. Preferably death and not imprisonment. Unless this was it—his dying fate, as it were, his personal circle of hell, not even a bloody smoke for company. Trapped in a life devoid of light and color, his only companion the irritating monotony of glass wind chimes.

  That would be poetic, would it not? Surrounded into eternity, haunted by glass. His laughter at the irony of it reverberated through space and against rock, absorbed by the tinkling of those fucking wind chimes, which only made them louder and more irritating.

  Gaelan reached out into the near darkness, hoping for a clue about his surroundings wondering absently why hadn’t thought of that earlier. A table sat just to the right of the cot. He slid his hand up its rough-hewn wooden leg through a maze of cobwebs and dust, finally reaching the edges of a flat surface.

  A wide, tall candle, half-consumed sat at the edge. Grimy and dusty, but hopefully useable.

  Et voila! A dry box of matches! Progress. Now to find those bloody fags!

  On his knees, Gaelan groped blindly though a carpet of dust along the cold stone floor in the direction he’d flung the cigarettes, until . . . Yes! There you are!

  Sitting cross-legged on the floor, Gaelan hungrily sucked smoke into his lungs, eyes closed, savoring the cloak of fumes as the nicotine worked to settle the jangle of his nerves. The cigarettes were truly awful, but you couldn’t be choosy with a life raft.

  Now, to that candle! He retraced his movements back to the cot.

  “Let there be light,” he shouted into the emptiness of the room, finally igniting the wick. Tiny sparks flew in all directions as the candle crackled and sputtered, burning off years of dirt and dust as it bathed the room in a dull haze of amber light. Indistinct shadows lurked about its curved walls and dark floor.

  But for the cot, the table, and the candle in its holder, the room was quite Spartan. An unopened case of bottled water sat on the floor beside his feet, and the clothing he’d been wearing were neatly folded at the end of the cot. When had he changed clothes? Bought fags—and water?

  How had he managed to ramble about Scotland, purchase provisions and find shelter, completely unaware? He had no memory of it.

  Gaelan chu
gged a full liter of the water, the cool moisture restoring his flagging energy as it slid down his parched throat. He finished another, only then realizing just how thirsty he was. How many days since he’d had food or drink?

  Perhaps if he’d the sense to acquire a case of water, he’d been lucid enough to buy food as well, but, alas, no sign of so much as a wrapper or tin. He lit another cigarette and put it out before the first drag. Best not go through them all in one sitting.

  The candle flickered on the table. The stick was quite old. Mid-sixteenth century? A long time since he’d encountered one of its like. The signature aroma of tallow. Ever the dealer in antiquities, even now. Not that it mattered much anymore. Long as the flame held out.

  An arched opening provided the only exit from the room. Time to explore.

  Coiled and wary, still uncertain he was alone, and not someone’s prisoner, Gaelan held the candle aloft and crept through the corridor, conscious of every footfall thudding softly on the dirt floor, echoing against the hard rock of the walls. He seemed to be a tunnel system of some sort.

  There were many such networks among the caves at the Scottish seacoast. Perhaps he’d stumbled into one of them? The items left there by some other wayfarer another time. That would make some sense. More sense, anyway.

  Gaelan wound his way through labyrinthine series of corridors, which linked numerous additional chambers, eroded and smoothed by time into glossy black. And then he saw the sconces. Gargantuan metal hands, every few feet, each bearing a candle much like the one he held. Each stuttered to life as Gaelan held his flame to the dusty, dormant wicks.

  He’d seen sconces of this sort before when he’d been a young lad. Not uncommon, he supposed, during the sixteenth century. Perhaps he’d happened upon an ancient privateer’s hideout, abandoned centuries earlier. It didn’t explain the clothing, water, or the fags, but . . .

  Gaelan turned, peering down the serpentine passageway. He’d lit at least twenty candles along the way. The flames reflected off the walls, painting eerie shadows along the rough-hewn glossiness.

  He turned down a new corridor corner and froze in his tracks. Memory, not of the past few days but of centuries earlier, flooded back in a torrent. Sagging against the wall, stunned and confused, he realized exactly where he was. Out of context and completely impossible. A place he had not visited in nearly two centuries. Had not resided for more than four.

  LONDON, 1826

  CHAPTER 5

  Tap . . . tap . . . tap.

  Gaelan Erceldoune awoke, gasping for air in the sweltering heat of his workroom, the last vestiges of a nightmare shattering into faded amber, merging into the dull candlelight and dying embers. It was the same nightmare he’d had nearly every night since moving to Smith-field one week past, always awakening to the pungent, sickly odor of burning flesh. Never would he rid himself of that morning in 1598—the execution of his father.

  The mantel clock read two o’clock, four hours since he’d last looked. When had he fallen asleep?

  Tap . . . tap . . . tap.

  A dull, muffled rapping through the apothecary alleyway door, out of rhythm with the clock. Who would visit in the dead of night?

  Rats. Had to be . . . or worse. No, nothing fouler than vile rats, lying in wait to burrow through the alleyway door, scratching, tapping at the wood until they’d broken through. Breeding everywhere pestilence and death. This section of London was rife with prey and the rats were sharp enough to know it.

  Two centuries since the Plague of 1625 had taken more than forty thousand, and Gaelan still shuddered at the lingering memory of Shoreditch that summer. The rodents brandishing death in dagger teeth, murdering everyone in their skittering path. They were to blame for destroying his life. Rats.

  They would not, this night, at least, slink in past his solid oak door. Not if he didn’t open it. And there was little reason to do so. Not at this hour. Peppermint oil would do to keep them at bay. Until the morrow.

  His walking stick would do well this night to chase them away, should the need arise. If, that is, he managed to locate it amongst the crates ported from Hay Hill, too few of which he’d emptied.

  Gaelan yawned and stretched, setting aside the heavy leather volume he’d been perusing. The tapping had stopped. Perhaps he wouldn’t hear it from upstairs in the flat, where he might manage a few hours more rest.

  A quick glance up toward the staircase. What would be the point? A full night’s sleep had eluded him since he’d opened shop in Smith-field. Why should this night be different?

  Gaelan yawned again, picturing the hundreds of items he’d yet to place upon the shelves he’d so meticulously cleaned and repainted: soaps and elixirs, herb teas and potions—for remedy or pleasure. If he could not sleep, at least he might put the time to clever use.

  He pried open a small crate, removing several bundles of dried herbs and flowers, garlic bulbs, and colorful dried peppers. He would hang them first, draping the window, welcoming, friendly. Then set the bottles and jars of brightly colored elixirs, names no one—save him—could pronounce, and jars of fragrant teas to line the shelves behind the long counter.

  With the blinds open, the bowed glass panes would catch the morning sun, reflect off the bottles and paint the plain walls with refracted streaks of colored light. Would that he’d have someone with whom—beyond the odd customer—to share such simple pleasures.

  Late at night, alone, Gaelan often lamented his long-standing vow to take no wife. The loneliness had begun to exact too dear a price. Distance always had been a necessary part of survival, relationships the inevitable casualty.

  Hay Hill had served its purpose well these past ten years. Not one of the elegant ladies entering Erceldoune’s Hay Hill Apothecary, for all their flirtatious glances, would elicit more than a polite smile and slight bow before a return to the business at hand. A very sharply drawn line, and one he never dared cross. Gaelan knew his station in the world of Hay Hill.

  Smithfield was a welcome change. A busy London market teeming with activity—and disease. And poverty.

  Few gentleman physicians would dirty their gloves in this filthy, vermin-infested place by stepping so much as a toe beyond the King Henry VIII Gate at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. As for the so-called surgeons practicing in these impoverished parts of London, they were too often little more than butchers in filthy shop-fronts preying upon the illiterate and desperate. Like rats, they bred with patent cures and so-called miracle tonics.

  Here, Gaelan’s practiced skill with knife and pestle, his vast experience as apothecary and surgeon, would do some good. And even better, the transience of Smithfield’s populace provided an anonymity that would certainly serve him well for many years to come.

  Gaelan opened the next crate, this one crammed to the top with handwritten manuscripts. To all appearances, a stack of ancient, yellowed papers; to Gaelan a rich legacy of knowledge and lore. Wisdom and practical medicine.

  The acid aroma of old ink and vellum swaddled him in the perfume of memory: his father hunched over his desk at home in Edinburgh, writing for hours into the night his meticulous medical notes; the wondrous stories of his ancestor Lord Thomas Learmont de Ercildoune and his strange, ancient book of healing said to be given him by the queen of Elfenland herself. Gaelan had only ever known the massive, illuminated manuscript as the ouroboros book for the tail-consuming snakes that decorated nearly every page. He kept it hidden up in the flat on a high shelf and out of his sight. And with exceptionally good cause.

  Gaelan removed a large, heavy journal from the top of the crate, admiring its deeply burnished leather cover, engraved with the family coat of arms. In the center, a single red rose with the Learmont motto, “I hope.”

  Tap . . . tap . . . tap.

  This time more insistent. Too loud for a rat. A feral dog?

  Plenty enough of them roaming round Smithfield, skinny and foraging for market-day leavings, sniffing about for a warm hearth.

  Tap . . . tap . . . t
ap.

  Now, an erratic scratching rhythm. Perhaps it was not a living thing at all, only a branch brushing up against the door on a windy night.

  Gaelan hoisted the journal, hurling it at the door in utter frustration. “Go away, and let me to work!”

  The tapping paused—again. He waited. Nothing. Good.

  Whatever it was, he’d scared it off to bother someone else. Sighing, Gaelan fetched the journal from the floor, relieved to find it undamaged.

  Yes, Smithfield would be a refreshing change, if not as financially lucrative as Hay Hill. Gaelan possessed a fortune adequate for a comfortable life. The flat above the shop was spacious enough—and the laboratory, after a few sore-needed renovations, would provide him a welcome sanctuary. The tall arched windows were perfect for his telescope.

  He opened the journal. “De curatione dysenteriae et alia practica nota querellis,” his father had inked in a large, elaborate hand. “On the practical treatment of dysentery and other known ailments,” by Lord Thomas Erceldoune, physician to the court of James VI, king of Scotland.

  A historical record, compiled by his father from those who’d preceded him, adding his own observations and those of contemporaries from all parts of Europe. Three centuries on, it remained a valuable guide for which many a practitioner would pay a fair penny. Especially for some of its strange formulas and procedures more resembling alchemy than modern treatments.

  Most compendia of this sort were long ago cast into so-called purifying fires, destroyed as sorcery along with the practitioners, his father and grandfather amongst them. The thick vellum pages had, over time, softened and yellowed with age and use. But of all the works in Gaelan’s library, none was so useful a treatise. A rare treasure, even unpublished.

  Gaelan turned to the final page of the journal, reading the fluid Latin of his father’s hand.