by Неизвестный
Carmen swallowed, sweating in the dank, small apartment. She shouldn’t have worn her sweater, but she never took it off in the presence of other people. Sweat made the thick material stick to the textured skin of her arms.
She’d stepped into this dingy place a few hours ago, and still hadn’t seen the old woman’s face. Carmen knew her name—Elsebeth—and knew what Elsebeth was claiming to offer, but that was it. She’d walked into this meeting blind.
Of all the places in the world to meet someone like Elsebeth, it had been through the Internet, through Deep Web chat rooms and subgroups and online friends-of-friends-of-screen-names. No ancient library, no mystic’s shop, no incense and candles. Carmen supposed it was appropriate for two scientists from across the ages to meet through something so technological.
If, she reasoned, Elsebeth was who she claimed to be.
“I asked the same thing, you know,” Elsebeth rasped. “I asked if it would hurt and he lied to me. My teacher was an arse. Would I have gone ahead with it anyway? Who knows. Maybe he knew. He knew what it felt like. I always swore I would never lie, if asked.”
“I’m… grateful, I suppose,” Carmen coughed politely. “And just who was your teacher?”
Again Elsebeth ignored her, preoccupied with her work. In her old hand, a machine flicked to life and whirred wetly in the concoction.
“Hand blenders,” Elsebeth cackled, putting it down when she was done. “I love these things! I used to have to grind the gyrfalcon eggs by hand.”
“Gyrfalcon eggs.”
“Three of them, from three different birds who have never killed, each laid under a waxing moon. Yes yes, child. I wrote the recipe down. I knew you’d want to know. This isn’t like making a pudding, you know. I think you have to make a few failed batches before you hit the magic one. It’s how it works. Don’t ask me why.”
Carmen squirmed nervously on her tattered chair, glancing at the door. She had latched it behind her as per Elsebeth’s instructions, assuming it was for their safety. The apartment was in a bad section of town. Did Elsebeth actually live here? Carmen doubted it.
In their correspondences, they’d discussed the science of life and death and beyond, but not a single personal word had been shared, and Carmen knew nothing about the old woman. She didn’t know where Elsebeth came from, how old she was, what she did for a living, if Elsebeth was even her real name. It didn’t seem to matter, when Elsebeth was offering the one thing Carmen had sought for years. Now Carmen wished she’d been more cautious, more sceptical. Then again, being cautious wasn’t going to get her anywhere.
Was Elsebeth lying? Maybe she was a serial killer. A psychopath. Carmen glanced at the door again. She could run and escape, if needed. It would take a few seconds to unlatch the door, but she could do it.
Elsebeth jiggled a bottle filled with liquid. “Water. From a source untouched by human hands. And yes, once you take the water, you spoil that source. You always need to find a new one. One day there will be no new ones left.”
“How long did it take to learn this recipe?”
“Oh, ages. But he had all the time in the world. This was hardly his first potion.”
“Who?”
Elsebeth poured the water. The weak lighting made her wispy hair look like a cracked halo around her head and Carmen wondered how she could work in such low light. “You know of alkahest, little girl?”
Carmen blinked. Elsebeth had pronounced the word differently than Carmen was familiar with, with her strange accent, and it took a few moments to realize what she was talking about. “Alkahest, yes, of course I know. Obviously. That’s the universal solvent, isn’t it? Creating it is one of the alchemical quests.”
“My teacher—the monster-- finally managed to cobble together the recipe for alkahest, after decades of research,” Elsebeth said. The more she talked, the more Carmen found her voice grating, unsettling, unnatural.
“But the victory was short-lived. Oh, you can create the universal solvent, but how do you contain it? The moment he stumbled upon the correct composition, the solution ate through his cauldron, extinguished the fire burning beneath, and continued to burn through the wood and the ground until the hole went on for fathoms. Bombastus was quite stunned, and remarked that the alkahest would only stop once it had eaten a hole clean through the world. I laughed and laughed at him, at the stupid look on his face. I thought that maybe one day I would travel the world to find the alkahest’s exit hole.”
“… Bombastus?”
“You might know him as Paracelsus. Sometimes I called him papa.”
“Paracelsus,” Carmen repeated. She knew Philippus Aureolus Paracelsus, and of course she knew him as Bombastus too. Anyone who had any interest in alchemy knew those name. He was a physician and occultist and had laid the groundwork for modern chemistry and medicine. She wracked her brains and recalled that the man had ostensibly died in the mid-1500s. “You’re telling me Paracelsus was your teacher?”
“Yes. He taught me everything I know about my science.”
“The science of alchemy?”
“Among many others, but yes. What we called alchemy back then was a great deal more sophisticated than what you children think it is.”
The fact that Elsebeth claimed to know the great alchemist wasn’t what made Carmen’s heart skip a beat; it was the fact that it might be true. Mechanically, she said, “But that’s impossible. That would make you almost five hundred years old.”
Elsebeth snorted indelicately. “You do realize the entire success of your search depends on what I just said being possible? You agreed to meet me because I promised to teach you how to mix the aqua vitae. And here we are.”
“Yes, but…”
Why was it so hard to take the plunge from theoretical to reality? Deep down, did she think Elsebeth was like the others she’d met over the years? The people who made promises about what they knew, and who turned out to be liars, scammers, delusional? Something had drawn her to Elsebeth, as though the smell of the boiling spices she was working in front of her had reached her through the online world.
Carmen licked her lips and asked, “… have you really been alive for five hundred years?”
“Oh yes.”
“What’s it like?”
“I told you. It hurts.”
“Physically?”Elsebeth made a dry snorting sort of sound. “Obviously. But it hurts your mind. We human beings, we were created with a finite capacity for remembering and for learning. We weren’t meant to have to understand so much. The world changes so quickly, you know.”
“I can see that,” Carmen said. She laughed, but it was dry and forced. “My grandfather never did get the hang of computers. He used to press the mouse against the screen.”
“And then there is time,” Elsebeth continued. “The more years are behind you, the faster time goes. The world changes too quickly. You adapt or you go insane. The mind wants to shut down after a while. Imagine if it couldn’t.”
Carmen nodded as though she understood. She didn’t, really. She didn’t understand much, beyond the oppressive heat of the apartment and the unsettling realization that she hadn’t even seen Elsebeth’s face yet.
She sublimated her nerves into forced casualness and said, “You know, people would spend billions for a bottle of potion that would make them immortal. You could be famous. Insanely rich. I have to wonder why you’re trolling around on the Deep Web and meeting people in shady apartments. Don’t you want lots and lots of money? You never asked me for payment.”
Elsebeth began convulsing, though it quickly became obvious she was laughing. “Haven’t I? You’re here, aren’t you?”
Carmen’s heart thudded hard, making her nauseated. It wasn’t excitement that made her feel this way. It was dread.
“A part of you is hoping I’m lying,” Elsebeth said, perceptively. “Isn’t it?”
Carmen said nothing, frowning at the old woman’s back.
Elsebeth dumped something out from a me
tal container, loudly clanging at it with a spoon. “Why are you here? The precise reason. Say it out loud, please.”
“I want the elixir of life. I don’t want to die.”
“Ah-ah. No. That’s not good enough. And it’s not true. No one wants to die. Well, hardly anyone. But the vast majority of folk accept it. Oh, they fear it. They try to delay it. They try to stop its ravages. But death is so abstract that most don’t even know how to fear it properly. But there is only one kind of person who would be willing to sit where you are sitting. And that is someone who has felt the bite.”
“The bite?”
“Someone who has been visited by death in a very real, very personal way.”
“… Okay,” Carmen croaked. “Okay. You’re right.”
“Of course I’m right. Now tell me.”
“I was twelve years old. I don’t think we were going anywhere special. My dad was driving, and my little sister and I were in the back seat. We were eating granola bars and picking out the chocolate chips- I don’t know why I remember that detail so clearly-- and then… there was a huge explosion. I put my arms up and all of a sudden they were stinging like fire. My dad yelled, I screamed, my sister screamed…”
“Tell me her name.”
Carmen hesitated before answering. The name was heavy in her mouth when she spoke it. “Marla. Marla screamed. The car finally stopped moving. Everything stank like burning rubber. We’d gotten sideswiped by a truck, but I didn’t know what was happening. My dad was still yelling, calling our names, trying to get out of his seat, but he couldn’t—his pelvis was broken and he couldn’t get himself out from behind the steering wheel. He still walks with a cane.”
Elsebeth nodded in sympathy. “And Marla?”
“… Marla was in the back seat behind dad, next to me. Her side of the car was in bad shape; that’s where the truck hit us. The metal had flown off all over the back seat. I had a few pieces lodged in my arms. One piece was… well, it was going straight through Marla’s neck.”
Carmen paused, squeezing her sweaty arms through the thick sweater. Elsebeth was motionless in the low light.
“She wasn’t dead,” Carmen said. “I got my seatbelt undone even though I was bleeding everywhere, and… I don’t know how else to put it, but… I remember fighting. Fighting against death, I guess. Yelling at Marla to stay awake, putting my hands against her neck and trying to stop the blood, but it was squirting, and I didn’t even know blood could do that. But I remember kneeling over her in the destroyed back seat of the car, yelling at her, and I remember how she stared at me—her eyes were wet and there was blood pouring out of her nose, and I just stared at her, until… until I lost the fight.”
“She died,” Elsebeth said.
“She died. My dad was never the same after. It wasn’t his fault, but my mom left him, and she killed herself five years later. I always figured she didn’t care about staying alive for me because… I was alive. I wasn’t as interesting as her dead daughter. She OD’ed on pills in her bedroom and I found her. Death won again. It just fucking…”
Carmen paused, hurriedly wiped away at her cheeks. “You want to know the stupidest part? As soon as mom died, I started studying to be a paramedic. I worked as a paramedic for ten years before changing my mind and going into chemistry and biology instead. See, every time someone asked me why I wanted to work as a paramedic, I gave some bullshit answer about wanting to save people because that’s what Marla would have wanted. But that wasn’t it at all.”
“It’s the look when death takes them,” Elsebeth said. “It’s the darkest thing you’ve ever seen in your life and yet you long to see it again. You become obsessed with it. Because one day, you want to gaze right back at death and return that look.”
“… Yes. Yes, that’s exactly it.”
“It feels like a bite. Doesn’t it?”
Carmen blinked. It wouldn’t have occurred to her to describe it like that, but… “Now that you mention it, yes. It does feel like a bite.”
“A bite in your very soul. It hurts, but all the same it feels… natural.”
“How do you know that? What does it mean?”
A clang, a bang, a loud bubbling noise, and Elsebeth seemed intent on ignoring her again.
Switching gears, Carmen stared down the back of the mystery woman in front of her and asked, “Elsebeth, what made you want to consume the elixir of life five hundred years ago? How did death visit you?”
Elsebeth paused, thoughtfully holding up a spoon. “You know, little girl, the strange thing about stuffing too much information into your head? The brain gets oddly selective about how it remembers. A lot of my memories are feelings instead of pictures, especially from before I met papa. But I can tell you that somewhere, in the back of my mind, there is the memory of wide, lifeless eyes staring deep into my soul, and the stench of the Black Death. To this day, I can’t get rid of that smell. It’s imprinted on the inside of my nose. That is, if the smell isn’t coming from my own rotting nose.”
Again that dry, rattling cackle. Carmen shifted uncomfortable.
Elsebeth continued, “And the bite. The only other memory that is clear. I feel the bite.”
“I don’t understand. What does the ‘bite’ mean?”
“You said,” Elsebeth said tersely. “That you understood my science. That you understood alchemy.”
“Hey, I do understand. I went into chemistry after quitting my job as a paramedic. I’ve wasted grants and I’ve gotten kicked out of labs for studying alchemy. I understand--”
“What you need to know you will not learn in a laboratory, melting metals and mixing potions. Balance. Alchemy is about balance. Alkahest is created and destroys all. You must know the Ouroboros— you must know the snake, biting away at its own tail.” She made a chomping motion with her thin hand. “He controls all. He is the closest thing to a god I’ve ever seen in my five centuries. Creation and destruction, life and death in a never-ending cycle. Alchemy is the science of that cycle. The science of balance. And the Ouroboros is the god of that balance.”
Elsebeth busied herself at her worktable for several minutes, stirring and pouring and Carmen, still blinking dumbly about the short speech, could suddenly hear something bubbling thickly. There came a scent so lovely it made her want to cry; moments later it was replaced by an acrid smell that filled her with nausea.
She gasped, heart racing, and suddenly felt a distinctive urge to get the hell out of the apartment. That dread again. That inexplicable dread.
“The aqua vitae is almost ready,” Elsebeth said. “You can smell it, can’t you? You want to run. Your soul is reacting to it. But remember, I never lied. I never promised it would be painless. I never said I didn’t want payment.”
“What’s happening?” Carmen said. Sweat poured down her back and she gagged. “What’s going to happen?”
“As you have been searching for me, I have been searching for you my entire life, Carmen,” she said. “Because the only thing more painful than feeling that bite is not feeling that bite. I needed to find someone who wanted what I desperately needed to shed.”
“What’s that?”
“A full circle. Creation and destruction,” Elsebeth said. Her raspy voice was now directed at her as she turned, for the first time. The light was too low to make out her features. “Immortality isn’t plucked from the ether, Carmen. The Ouroboros must bite. If someone wants life, then somewhere else, there must be death.”
“You psycho!” Carmen said. She bolted from her chair. “You planned on killing me? You lying bitch!”
“Stupid, stupid girl. Behind you on the wall, there is a light switch. Would you turn it on, please? Soon everything will become clear.”
Licking dry lips, Carmen obeyed, reaching out behind her with a shaking hand until she felt the switch and flicked it on. A lamp next to Carmen’s chair stuttered before spilling light into the room, and Carmen finally got her first look at the immortal alchemist. “Oh Jesus… oh fuck�
�”
Elsebeth smiled at her through a mummified, toothless mouth. Her skin was wrinkled, dry, cracked, and so paper-thin Carmen could see every vein, every broken capillary, every nerve fiber. She watched Carmen with milky eyes sunken into skeletal sockets, her skull mostly bare except for some wisps of colourless hair.
Elsebeth wore a dress that left her arms bare. The bones there were crooked; her left arm appeared to have two extra joints, and there was a chunk of skin missing above her elbow, about the size of Carmen’s palm. It wasn’t bleeding; just raw, red, and open, though the edges of the flesh looked wilted, like a dying plant. She held a ladle in her right hand, though her grip was odd; two of her fingers had been twisted to the point that they faced in a different direction from the rest.
Carmen had seen elderly women before, those specials on television about the oldest people in the world, people who were in the Guinness Book of World Records. People who were over a century old. They all had the same look; wrinkled, bent, fragile as a leaf, faces distorted beneath ancient, sagging skin. Elsebeth looked nothing like that, and suddenly Carmen was overwhelmed with the desire to hurt this horrible thing, to destroy it, her very soul was reacting to the hugely unnatural sight of Elsebeth.
Elsebeth gave her a few moments to take in her appearance. Her smile widened ghoulishly as she jerkily twirled the ladle in her hand.
“I was young, once, and while I was never a great beauty, you would not have gasped in horror at the sight of me,” Elsebeth rasped. “Papa found me on one of his travels, probably half-buried under the corpses of those who’d already succumbed to the Black Death, and saved me. Evidently, he had worse things in mind for me. I don’t remember much, but with the stench of the Black Death deep inside my nose, how could I resist? How could I know?”
While she spoke, Carmen continued to stare at her body. Elsebeth was missing a breast and patches of skin over her collarbone. The outline of a hipbone jutted out severely from the fabric of her dress.