The Alchemist in the Attic

by Urias, Antonio

  “They were my friends,” Atwood spat.

  “The boys, yes, I know.” Valencourt looked away for a moment. “I’m sorry for them. Their deaths served no scientific purpose, but I couldn’t take the risk.” There was genuine sympathy in his eyes when he turned back to them, but not a trace of remorse or shame.

  “I can understand killing to protect your secrets.” Atwood forced himself to say the words, stung with the truth of them. He was not a murderer, but he had done terrible things to protect himself. He was no stranger to keeping secrets. “But why the mutilations, then?”

  Valencourt flinched, but said nothing.

  “That wasn’t you,” Madame Valli breathed. The pieces were starting to fall into place. “That was the other one.”

  “Very clever, Madame.” Valencourt was prickly and sour. Clearly this was a sore point.

  “Who, then? Collins?” she asked.

  “No!” Valencourt shook his head. “The poor man had no stomach for that sort of work.”

  “Poor man?” Atwood scowled and his hand clenched into a fist. “I’ve seen what you made of that poor man. He’s a ruin.”

  “I can still sympathize with his plight, Mr. Atwood. I am not a monster.” Valencourt rose to his full, spindly height. “But it was necessary. It was all necessary.”

  “Why?”

  “I was driven to this. If I hadn’t been hounded out of academia, I could have completed my work at the university in a controlled environment, and none of these regrettable incidents would have been necessary.”

  “They hounded you because you’re a killer,” Atwood said. “And because you’re clearly insane.”

  “Is that what your friends in Paris told you, Madame?” Valencourt sneered. “If they truly wanted to stop my experiments, then why is everyone so interested in my notebook? Collins couldn’t wait to get his hands on it, and I see that you two have found it as well.” He nodded to his notes, still open on the table.

  Valencourt shook his head. “No, they don’t want to stop me. This isn’t about lives or morality. This is about stealing my credit, after decades of toil, of work, of sacrifice!” He was practically shouting by the end. The mask had slipped ever so slightly, and Atwood could see the rage inside, but there was something else, too, a desperation and a muted hurt.

  That was the moment that Atwood knew he had him. Valencourt might be a murderer, but the balance had shifted. Valencourt had deliberately lured him here for a reason, and Atwood thought he finally knew what that reason was. Men like Valencourt only had one reason to talk to men like him. That meant he still had leverage, if he played this right and gathered his wits. They were no longer in the realm of alchemy and madness. They were in Atwood’s territory now. He understood the need for recognition, and he knew how to feed from it.

  “Well,” Atwood said, summoning his most ingratiating, toothy smile. “I don’t know much about science or alchemy, but credit? Maybe you and I can do something about that.”

  Valencourt barked a laugh that quickly descended into a hacking, deep-throated cough. “I have been scorned and derided by my peers, men who had the learning if not the wit to understand me, and you really think I’m just going to tell my story to some half-penny-newspaper hack?”

  “Yes,” Atwood said simply.”

  “Such confidence.” Valencourt tilted his head and studied him, as if he were a specimen under a microscope. “Especially for a man without a paper.”

  Atwood blinked at that. Valencourt was very well informed, but he recovered quickly. “No more confident than you,” he said. “You were a learned doctor and now you’re just the mad alchemist in the attic. That doesn’t seem to have slowed you down any.”

  “Ah.” Valencourt grunted. “So I’m going to tell you all my secrets, because we’re kindred spirits?”

  “No.” Atwood shook his head. “That would be ridiculous. You’re going to tell me because, at the moment, a newspaper hack is all you’ve got, because Madame Valli will shoot you if you don’t, and because you knew who I really was, and you lured me in anyway.”

  “Yes,” Valencourt said with a secret smile. “I suppose I did.” He gave Atwood a once-over. Atwood returned his gaze levelly, but beside him, Madame Valli offered a mocking smile and a wave of her gun.

  “Very well,” Valencourt said after a moment. “I suppose it couldn’t hurt. After all, I may have need of your services.” Atwood frowned at that, but Valencourt continued, undeterred. “I have discovered the secret of alchemy,” he declared grandly. “Not the banker’s dream of petty gold, or the empty promise of immortality, but the true secret.” He paused expectantly.

  For all his initial reluctance, he clearly needed an audience, just as Atwood had believed, and usually he could be that perfect, attentive audience. It was his greatest skill, but he was momentarily distracted. Valencourt’s smile had seemed somehow more ominous than before. For her part, Madame Valli simply watched the alchemist with studied indifference.

  “I’m talking about synthetic life,” Valencourt continued, slightly disappointed at the lack of reaction. “Not bottled, or distilled, or patched together piecemeal, but grown.”

  The word hung in the air and Atwood’s eyes strayed to the canvas and the branches beyond. “Grown,” he muttered to himself, half in awe, half disgusted.

  “Yes,” said Valencourt. “Grown. I spent years pouring over The Book of Stones, trying to decipher the code, studying Jabir ibn Hayyan. The Ottomans were on the right track, you know, clever people. And when I combined their findings with Levi and Mendel…” He paused, perhaps enraptured by his own genius, or to make sure that he had their full attention. He most certainly did. Even Madame Valli’s interest seemed piqued.

  “It took me years,” Valencourt said. “Years of cross-pollination, of cultivating a soil sufficiently fruitful, of magnifying a light sufficiently bountiful. There were a hundred misshapen failures, but I loved them all the same, even the monsters.” His face crumpled. “They laughed at me, you know, my colleagues. Scorned me.” He muttered angrily to himself.

  Atwood glanced at Madame Valli with increasing alarm. He wasn’t sure what he had been expecting from a self-described alchemist, but he could see the madness brewing behind the polite exterior. Despite his protestations to the contrary, Valencourt was a talker. Until now he had only lacked an audience, and for some reason Atwood and, by extension, Madame Valli had been chosen. But he couldn’t forget Swifty and Little Jake, their mangled bodies pulled from the Bay. That gruesome sight colored Valencourt’s every word.

  “The mandrake is the last tentative vestige of our terrestrial origin,” Valencourt continued heedlessly. He was clearly itching to give this peculiar lecture, probably had been for years. Atwood had the uncomfortable feeling that this was, at least in part, what had driven Collins mad.

  “The mandrake’s very shape betrays it. It’s almost human. We’ve always known that, in certain higher circles, but no one ever dared see how deep the resemblance goes, until me. I crossed and re-crossed a thousand generations before I had the perfect vessel, and then I implanted it with human seed and let it grow.” He smiled again, but there was nothing secret or ominous about this smile. This was a smile of triumph and terrible certainty.

  Atwood had barely followed his rambles and, if he was honest, had taken his words as the delusions of a madman with more money than sense, but as Valencourt began to describe his efforts to impregnate his mandrake creations, Atwood’s stomach turned. Delusional or not, a single glance around the laboratory revealed that Valencourt was more than willing to try to create such an abomination. Madame Valli’s friends hadn’t mentioned, let alone imagined, anything like this.

  “At long last,” Valencourt said, “I did it. The proportions are all correct. I have grown a human body.”

  He reached back slowly, careful of Madame Valli’s gun still aimed at him unwaveringly, and removed the canvas with a flourish. Looming in the corner stood a tree, gnarled and twisted. Growing fr
om one of the branches like an apple or a blossom was a figure, more a mangled, distorted parody of man than a recognizably human form, but as Valencourt had said, the proportions were accurate. There were the requisite number of limbs. And it was breathing.

  Atwood stepped forward once, twice, in mute shock, almost as if in a trance. His brain rebelled at the sight, desperately trying to reconcile what his eyes were seeing. The initial wrongness of it was almost visceral. His eyes seemed to rebel. But in the end it was not the twisted deformities that repulsed and amazed him, but the similarities. The thing growing from that tree would have been less horrific if it had been more creature than homunculus. It was alike and yet unalike, and therein lay the horror.

  Atwood didn’t know how long he stared, lost in his own private world of terror and awe. He felt feverish, as if his nightmares had crawled out of his head and taken root, literally, as if this was not Valencourt’s madness but his own. The feeling passed slowly, stinging like a leech inside his mind, and the image gradually coalesced before him. At length, when he could at last see a man’s features instead of a mere abhorrence, Atwood received the greatest shock of all.

  That figure growing from the tree was terribly, monstrously familiar. He knew that face. He knew it all too well. Atwood stumbled back, realizing in an incoherent burst just how deeply he’d been tricked. The bait and the hook.

  There was a sudden commotion behind him, the sounds of a struggle, a clatter and a thud, but his feet were stuck to the ground; his body enthralled to his moment of epiphany, unable to accept it or escape. Someone finally cleared their throat and Atwood forced himself to turn as if in a dream. Madame Valli had been disarmed and the homunculus’ twin loomed behind her with her gun in his hand.

  “I see you’ve met my brother,” he said softly, almost bashfully.

  It was Walter, and he looked quite at home.

  26

  The Great Work

  Atwood stared at Walter for a long moment, unable to think, unable to speak. His world had tilted on its axis for the second time in as many minutes. He glanced back and forth at the homunculus behind him growing from the tree, then at the man before him, the man he thought he knew. His eyes were not deceiving him, no matter how much he wished they were. This was not a dream.

  “This is the other man I was telling you about,” Madame Valli said, breaking him from his reverie. “The secretive one.” She seemed only mildly concerned by the gun to her head.

  “That,” Atwood managed to say through his mental vertigo. “Is Walter.”

  “Ah,” said Madame Valli, glancing over her shoulder. “Your partner. I suppose that makes sense.”

  And it did make sense, a bizarre, terrible sense. Atwood had been thoroughly tricked. That hadn’t happened in years. He hadn’t believed it was even possible, but he knew now. He held on tight to that knowledge and the anger boiling up inside and used it to pull himself out of the depths of his confusion.

  “Brother?” he asked, focusing on his so-called friend. His mind was a whirlwind of questions, but escape was of foremost importance. He wouldn’t be fooled a second time. He had always been smarter than Walter; at least he thought he had. That was debatable now, and the thought cut deep.

  “Yes.” Walter nodded. “My very own brother. He doesn’t have a name yet, but I was thinking, perhaps, of Theodore.” He smiled, almost nervously.

  Atwood met Madame Valli’s knowing gaze and swallowed back bile. Naming a tree-grown homunculus after him was a dubious honor at best and he doubted whether he would appreciate the intentions behind it.

  “Walter,” he said. “What on earth do you…” Atwood paused as another thought struck him. He should have caught it sooner, but he had still been trying to deal with the previous revelation. His mind was slow and unsteady.

  “You!” Atwood cried, his anger exploding inside him now. “It was you! You’re the one who killed Swifty! You carved him open, you son of a bitch!”

  Atwood lunged forward, but Walter was too quick. Atwood had seen him move before, but still he was surprised at the quickness, the steadiness.

  “That’s close enough,” Walter said, drifting back. He pressed his borrowed gun closer to Madame Valli’s head. “I would prefer to avoid unnecessary violence.”

  Walter wasn’t blinking. His voice was calm, steady, soft even, but there was something implacable behind his eyes. Atwood was not deterred.

  “Unnecessary violence?” he said. “You carved them open!”

  “You needed motivation,” Walter replied lightly. “I provided some.”

  “No. You killed them out of spite.” Atwood narrowed his eyes. “You’re a jealous little creature. I’ve always known that, but I didn’t realize until now how far you’d go.”

  “It pains me to hear you say that,” Walter said.

  Atwood glared. “Why did you lure me here?” he asked.

  “I was the first,” Walter said. “Imperfect, perhaps, but alive and fully grown. My poor brother is almost ready, but he lacks one final element. He has been fed, watered, and nurtured, and all he requires now is a soul.”

  Madame Valli, the lapsed spiritualist, the unrepentant huckster, barked a short laugh. “You can’t be serious,” she said. “That’s what all this was about, the soul? Please! I’ve peddled better nonsense than this!”

  “How dare you! My father’s work is not nonsense!” Walter pressed the gun deep into her neck to quiet her. She glared defiantly, but sighed and was silent, although she continued to radiate disbelief.

  Atwood was less skeptical, but only slightly. “But is there even such a thing as a soul?” he asked.

  “Spiritually?” Valencourt spoke up the first time since Walter’s arrival. “Perhaps.” He glared at Madame Valli. His pride had been bruised, and from the sudden triumphant glint in her eyes, that was all she had ever intended. Atwood was familiar with the tactic, and took heart that it seemed to be working.

  “Scientifically?” Valencourt continued. “Undoubtedly. Or near enough. You may call it a life essence, if you prefer. In any case, it can’t be manufactured, but it can be distilled, transferred even, and it is essential.”

  “And I chose yours,” said Walter.

  “Mine?” Atwood inched his way toward one of the tables, as casually as possible. Various apparatus and tools were glinting in the candlelight. He glanced around furtively. There had to be something he could use as a weapon. Madame Valli’s eyes followed his progress approvingly.

  “Why me?” he asked, mostly playing for time, but he was genuinely curious and terrified of the answer.

  “Because you’re my friend,” Walter said, as if it was obvious, and perhaps it was to him. “My only friend. We have shared interests, shared experiences. In truth, I am only a few years old, and I have known you most of my life. The murders, the paper, none of that matters. There is no one else worthy, no one else with the soul of a brother. It was meant to be.” He was filled with such monstrous sincerity that it turned Atwood’s stomach.

  Atwood realized suddenly that in Walter’s eyes there was no betrayal here. For Walter their friendship had always been utterly genuine. He worshiped Atwood like a brother. He just happened to be insane. Atwood glanced between Valencourt and Walter. Events suddenly crystallized for him. They were mad, the pair of them, but Valencourt more so. Walter had been born, or rather grown, from his father’s madness. He never had a chance, but the old man had come by his naturally.

  “I hoped you would embrace your destiny willingly,” Walter said. “But your consent is not required.”

  “Neither your memories nor your personality will survive the process,” said Valencourt. “For all intents and purposes, Theodore Atwood will cease to exist, but your essence, your bond with my son will endure.”

  “Do you really believe that?”

  “Walter does, and whatever makes Walter happy.” He shrugged, almost apologetically. “I promised, after all.”

  “Well,” Atwood said with all the scorn he
could muster, “if you promised.”

  From a nearby table, Valencourt removed a long, sharp syringe, filled with a sickly green concoction. “I assure you the process will be as painless as possible.”

  “That’s not the same thing as painless.”

  “No,” Walter agreed. “I’m afraid there will be some pain. I’m sorry, but it’s unavoidable.”

  “Not from where I’m standing,” Atwood replied and made a sudden mad dash for the door, but Walter was still at his post. He threw Madame Valli to one side and brought his gun to bear, reluctantly yet unerringly aimed at Atwood’s leg. Kneecaps, apparently, were not vital to the soul.

  Valencourt approached slowly, syringe in hand, as he might a dangerous, wounded animal. Atwood saw his chance. Madame Valli saw it too. She nodded at him, urging him to take it. He’d never been particularly strong, but he was quick. Atwood had survived his share of barroom brawls mostly through speed and agility. He waited until the last possible moment, painfully aware of Walter and his gun, and then he struck, grabbing the syringe from Valencourt’s startled fingers. Before either of them could react he had it pressed threateningly against the alchemist’s neck.

  “Now,” he said to Walter, “I don’t suppose you’d let Madame Valli and I walk out of here, body and soul intact?”

  But Walter was not paralyzed for long. Before Atwood had finished, he had already responded, quicker than Atwood had ever seen him. He reached down and pulled Madame Valli to her feet at gunpoint.

  “Depends,” Walter replied. “Would you allow my father and I to peacefully transfer your soul?”

  “No.”

  Walter studied Atwood calmly. “Then we would appear to be at an impasse. Although, that’s only a sedative,” he said. “My father would wake up soon enough. Would the opera singer wake up if I shot her?”

  “Depends where you shot me, darling,” Madame Valli managed with a strained smile, before Walter dug the gun into her throat.