The Alchemist's Door

by Lisa Goldstein

  “No,” Dee said. “It’s a fallen angel, one of those that rebelled with Lucifer against God.”

  “We don’t believe that. We believe—”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Dee said. He was in no mood to discuss theology with an unbeliever. “What was it you were reciting?”

  “The ninety-first psalm. The song against demons, it is called.”

  “Which one is that?”

  In answer Loew began to recite. “Thou shalt not be afraid of the terror by night, nor of the arrow that flies by day … . No evil shall befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling … . He shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways.’”

  “A good psalm to remember,” Dee said. He had heard it, of course, but had not known that it could be used to banish demons.

  “And a window must be open while you recite,” Loew said. “There must be somewhere for the demon to go.”

  “Is it gone for good, then? Did you get rid of it?”

  “No, unfortunately.”

  “But can you—”

  Loew shook his head. “No, I’m afraid not. I don’t know nearly enough. But it must be exorcized, and soon. If it becomes strong enough it can inhabit a man completely, taking over his mind and body forever, extinguishing his immortal soul. You were very fortunate here.”

  “I don’t feel fortunate.” He tried to laugh, but it sounded hollow.

  “There is, of course, a temporary solution, and that is to stop using the showstone.”

  Dee picked up the stone gingerly and turned it over in his long fingers. Loew moved to stop him but then sat back and let him continue, as if satisfied he would not do anything rash.

  The stone was miraculously unbroken. Could he bring himself to stop using it? He had so many questions left to ask the angels. But he would have to—he couldn’t risk possession by the demon again.

  “And I will have to find this righteous man the angel spoke of, the one who lives here in Prague,” Loew said. “In fact our tasks may be related. The demon said that if this man is killed the world will end, and then the demons can remake it the way they want. Perhaps if we find this man, and protect him so that the demon cannot harm him—perhaps then it will go away.”

  “Find him how?”

  Loew shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “There’s too much we don’t know.”

  “Yes. We need to learn more. I will ask rabbis and scholars in other towns for help. And you should talk to people you know, all those alchemists and sorcerers I see in the streets. There seem to be more and more of them every day, ever since Rudolf came to Prague.”

  “I don’t really know them, though. I just arrived here myself.”

  “Well, then,” Loew said. “You should try to make their acquaintance, shouldn’t you?”

  NEITHER DEE NOR KELLEY SAID A WORD ON THE LONG WALK back. It was noon when they got to the house, but Dee went straight to bed and tried to sleep. It was no use. Almost as soon as he closed his eyes he began to relive the scene in Loew’s study, feeling the demon crawl inside him like a worm and then take him over completely. He felt dirty, violated.

  After a while he stood and looked through the few books he had brought with him. They were no help, though; none of them dealt with anything like this.

  He must have slept; he woke in his bed, the sun shining in his eyes. He felt unrefreshed, as if he had spent the night struggling against an irresistible force, and his sheets were bunched in knots. His mouth was dry as a stone.

  He went to the kitchen. Jane was already there, setting out bread and butter for the children. “What happened to you yesterday?” she asked.

  He couldn’t say that they were no longer safe here, that their brief feeling of safety had been a fool’s dream. That they had not escaped after all. Instead, he told her about what he had discovered at Loew’s house, the legend of the thirty-six men.

  “And that explains why you slept for twenty hours straight,” Jane said sourly.

  “I wasn’t feeling well,” he said.

  He could tell she didn’t believe him. “Your friend’s gone again,” she said. “That odious man Kelley.”

  “Did he say where he was going?”

  “He didn’t say anything. He was gone before I got up.”

  Dee went out into the city after breakfast, intending to search for the alchemists as Loew had suggested. Kelley had once mentioned a street called Golden Lane, but Dee had no idea where that was. Somewhere across the river, he thought. But the fear that had dogged him since London kept him on his own side; the other side, he remembered, was haunted with angels.

  He ended up in a town square. There was a clock here too, a huge thing of blue and gold, with mechanisms for telling the hour and the month and the signs of the zodiac. What a city this is for timepieces, he thought.

  As he watched, the figure of Death came out and inverted an hourglass. Then the apostles paraded in front of him; the clock chimed the hour; various allegorical figures followed, Greed and Vanity and Lust. Greed was represented by a Jewish moneylender; he thought of Rabbi Loew, then remembered Hageck’s wild claims and shook his head.

  “They put his eyes out, you know,” someone near him said.

  It was the old woman again, Magdalena; Dee could tell that without even looking, though oddly he could not call up her face. “Whose eyes?” he asked, not turning around.

  “The clockmaker’s. They didn’t want him building anything like this again. About a hundred years ago, this was.”

  He faced her. “Were you following me again?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is intolerable. I’ll set the watch on you. I’m not without influence here, you know. King Rudolf himself—”

  “You seemed lost. Is there anything you’re looking for? Maybe I can help.”

  Could she? For the first time he wondered what had brought her to such a pass. How had she come to wander the streets of Prague, as old and infirm as she was? Did she have no family? Or had they thrown her out for working magic?

  He found himself, to his own surprise, feeling pity for her. Jane had once told him that he had a good heart, that he could never turn away strays in need of help, not even a criminal like Kelley. “Maybe you can,” he said. “I’m looking for alchemists or astrologers. The men who came here because of King Rudolfs reputation.”

  “Of course—I know them all. Come with me.”

  He had no choice but to follow her. “Do you know where Golden Lane is?” he asked as they set off.

  She laughed. “Oh, you’ll find no alchemists there,” she said. “The street got its name from the goldsmiths who work for King Rudolf. Or from the rivers of piss that flow through it—there’s nowhere to dump the waste.”

  “Where are we going then?”

  “Patience,” she said.

  Despite this last command they stopped soon afterwards. Magdalena motioned Dee into a tavern. He shrugged and went inside; he had already discovered that Bohemian beer was very good, as tasty as English ale.

  The place smelled of cabbages and sausage. His eyes strained to see in the dim light. At first he thought the tavern was empty, but then Magdalena led him toward a trestle table in the corner, occupied by several men. Yellow candles burnt to fat stubs ranged across the table, lighting the men’s faces from below.

  Now he could see well enough to recognize some of the people he had already noticed in the city: the man in the black cloak, his two black mastiffs lying on the floor near him; the tall man with the aristocratic bearing who had spoken to thin air. Magdalena sat at one of the benches and began talking to someone hidden in the shadows.

  The man who spoke to air noticed him and nodded. “Sit,” he said. “My name is Michael Sendivogius.”

  He took a place at one of the benches. The table was made of rough wood and covered with mystical signs scored into the surface, stars and numbers and alphabets, crescents and circles and triangles.

  “I am Doctor
John Dee.”

  “Indeed?” Sendivogius said. “I’ve heard of you. You wrote a number of books, didn’t you? Monas …”

  “Monas Hieroglyphica.”

  But Sendivogius was already introducing the others, too quickly for Dee to remember them all. There was someone from Greece—this was the man with the dogs—and a pair of men from Hungary with nearly identical faces: thin and sharpplaned, with long brown hair. One of the men had jewels plaited in his beard. Then Sendivogius introduced a Scotsman, Alexander Seton. “A countryman of yours,” Sendivogius said.

  Dee was opening his mouth to explain the difference between England and Scotland when Sendivogius indicated the last person at the table. His hair and eyes and beard were blacker than any Dee had ever seen. He wore a richly embroidered brocade coat, frayed and raveled at the edges.

  Dee realized with shock that the man was a Saracen, an infidel. Yet even as Dee thought of bloody religious wars and vowed to have nothing to do with him, he remembered that the word “alchemy” came from “al Khemia,” or “from Egypt,” and he felt a powerful desire to know more. He noticed, surprised, that the Saracen and Magdalena were deep in conversation.

  When the courtesies were done the men continued their conversations among themselves, speaking in a babel of languages. The two Hungarians conducted a heated conversation in a language Dee did not recognize, all sibilants and misplaced accents; it sounded like cats fighting. If this was Hungarian, he thought, it was even more barbaric than Czech.

  The Greek man shifted toward Dee. He was somewhere in his forties, with a round face, a black unruly beard, and dirty black hair that hung to his shoulders. His eyes popped from their sockets, the whites mottled and unhealthy, almost yellow.

  “Are you looking for something?” he asked. His dogs turned toward Dee as well.

  Could this man help him? But before Dee could ask the man spoke again.

  “Tincture of mercury, perhaps? Cassia pulp? Vitriol of Mars?”

  A fraud, Dee thought, disappointed. He had met men like this often enough, accompanying Kelley to various alchemists and astrologers in England. Almost all of them had proved to be braggarts and mountebanks, people who would claim anything to embellish their reputations.

  “I’m afraid I don’t remember your name,” Dee said to gain time.

  “Mamugna. I have a mandrake root, gathered under a gallows at midnight … .”

  “I—no, thank you. I’m looking for knowledge.”

  “Yes, of course. You’ve come to the right place. You have only to ask—those of us who are embarked on the Great Work hide nothing from each other.”

  This had not been Dee’s experience. But he had caught a word farther down the table, something that sounded promising. He held up his hand to indicate to Mamugna that he wanted to listen.

  “King Rudolf himself came to Prague only two years ago,” Sendivogius was saying. His accent was similar to Prince Laski’s, and now Dee realized that despite the man’s splendid Latin-sounding name he had to be Polish. “And why? The Holy Roman Emperors traditionally make their capital in Vienna. But Rudolf knows a thing or two about magic. He knows that something is about to happen here. Anyone with even the slightest magical ability feels it.”

  “Nonsense,” Alexander Seton said. “Magic is available everywhere, and to everyone. King Rudolf is a great patron, I agree, but he himself knows nothing.”

  “But look at him,” Sendivogius said. “He rarely leaves his castle, he has fits of melancholy, he throws things … . It’s clear what has happened to him. He has meddled in things too great for his understanding, and is slowly going mad.”

  “His entire family is subject to these fits,” Seton said. “He is descended on both sides from Joanna the Mad, after all. As I said, it has nothing to do with magic.”

  “Then what about other rulers near Prague?” Sendivogius asked. “In Russia they call the czar who just died Ivan the Terrible.”

  “And also there is Báthory Erzsébet,” one of the Hungarians said. His accent was very strong.

  “Elizabeth Báthory,” the other said. “Here it is the family name last.”

  “Elizabeth Báthory, yes,” the first one said. “A princess in my country. The people say that she bathes in the blood of virgins so that she stays always young.”

  “Rulers have always been mad,” Seton said. “This means nothing. It—”

  “Prague in the Czech language is Praha,” Mamugna said, joining the conversation.

  Dee turned to him. What did this have to do with magic? But Mamugna was continuing.

  “Praha means threshold,” the Greek said. “We stand on the threshold here. Not just between east and west, and between northern and southern Europe, though that is certainly part of it, the fact that we are at the center of the great trade routes of Europe. But we are also between the living and the dead, the spirit world and our own. One step across, and we are somewhere else. And that step can be anywhere in the city.”

  “Do you mean,” Dee said slowly, “that it is easier for spirits to come here than anywhere else? That the—the doorway between their world and ours lies in Prague?”

  “Yes, of course,” Mamugna said. “And as the door opens wider there will be more and more of them, filling the city.”

  But my spirit appeared to me in England, Dee thought. “What about possession?” he asked. “Have any of you known a demon to inhabit living bodies?”

  “Of course,” Sendivogius said. “Such things are common enough.”

  “What can be done, though?” Dee asked. “How do you force the demon to leave the body?”

  “Done?” Sendivogius said. “I don’t know that anything can be done. As my colleague here said, in Prague the spirits travel where they like. But are you talking about a specific case?”

  “A friend of mine,” Dee said. “He called up a demon and now cannot send it back.”

  “How did he do it?” Seton asked. His eyes glowed like sword-points in the candlelight.

  “He used a showstone,” Dee said. “He can see angels in the glass.”

  “Ah,” Seton said. “How does he prepare the glass?”

  Dee felt despair, and a tendril of the fear that was never far from him now. These men knew very little. They were more interested in learning from him than they were in answering his questions.

  “It’s best to clean the glass with holy water,” Mamugna said. “I have some water that has been blessed by none other than a bishop—”

  “Nonsense,” Sendivogius said. “All that is needed is ordinary water and vinegar.”

  “Is it?” Mamugna said. “You see here what happens without careful protection—”

  “I had this from the Befaninis, who are cooks for the great house of—”

  “Befaninis! But that means little witches in Italian!”

  “Just so,” Sendivogius said.

  Dee rose to go. These men had some knowledge, but it would take weeks to sort out anything useful, and he felt too weary to even begin to attempt it. As he stood he saw Magdalena and the Saracen, talking to each other as though no one else in the room existed. Magdalena threw back her head and laughed, her long beak of a nose pointing toward the ceiling. Dee sat back down, next to Magdalena this time, and tried to hear what they were saying.

  They had become serious. “Have you given any more thought to my suggestions?” the man said to Magdalena. To Dee’s surprise he had only the slightest trace of an accent.

  “Yes, of course,” Magdalena said. “But I can find no one to help me. I wish you would stay and be my teacher.”

  “Unfortunately I cannot. And it is best to have only one teacher, one master. It would be irresponsible of me to start you on a course of study and then leave you.”

  “I understand.”

  “I’m afraid I have some business to attend to now,” the man said, standing up. Now Dee could see his loose-fitting trousers, as worn as the coat, and supple leather boots. “You’ll be joining me for supper at t
he usual time, I hope?”

  “Of course.”

  “Take care,” the man said.

  She turned to watch him as he went, and saw Dee. “Would you introduce me to your friend?” Dee asked quickly, before the man could take his leave.

  “This is Master Al Salah,” she said. Her features were blurred in the candlelight. “And this is Doctor Dee, from England.”

  The man inclined his head in a bow. “It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Doctor Dee,” he said.

  “The pleasure is mine,” Dee said. But before he could say anything else Al Salah bowed again and left the tavern.

  Magdalena laughed. “You’re wondering what the likes of him has to do with the likes of me,” she said.

  His expression must have given him away, though he had tried to hide his astonishment. “I am, yes,” he said. She would not believe him now if he lied to spare her feelings. “And did you say you’re meeting him for supper?”

  “He’s kind enough to feed me,” she said. “Otherwise I would probably starve.”

  “That’s good of him,” Dee said absently. His mind was whirling with everything he had heard. It was time to go home and try to make some sense of it. “Goodbye.”

  “Goodbye,” Magdalena said. “I’ll see you soon.”

  Dee left the tavern and headed toward Doctor Hageck’s house. Why was this man helping her? Did he see something in her that Dee had missed? Or was he simply being charitable, feeding her to keep her from starving?

  That last was probably it, Dee thought. His thoughts turned to what he had learned at Rabbi Loew’s, that there was a righteous man, one of thirty-six, here in Prague. Could it be Al Salah? What did that mean, to be righteous? Was it enough just to do good, as Al Salah seemed to be doing?

  Or was the man they searched for another of the alchemists? It seemed unlikely. Poor Magdalena, trying to learn something useful from that mixed collection of rogues and seekers. She at least seemed sincere. Perhaps she was—No. But maybe … Had the angel said the thirty-sixth had to be a man? He couldn’t remember.