Madeleine sat alone at the table.
If Isaac Newton was one of the boys she’d just seen, who was the other? She knew he’d been a loner as a child. His father had died before he was born, and his mother remarried when Isaac was three. He got left behind with his grandparents. He wandered streets and fields alone. He built windmills, kites and water clocks. At school, other children teased him.
So who was the other boy?
She thought back over the image she had seen. The two boys were the exact same size and colouring.
It was not two boys, she realised. It was the same boy twice.
One boy alone, facing himself.
12
After a moment, Madeleine took a notepad and pen from her backpack.
She ate the leftover scones, and she wrote a letter to her father.
Dear Dad,
The last time I wrote to you, you sent the letter back. Mum says we should leave you be, and not get in contact at all. But I’m disobeying her.
Because I want to tell you something about Isaac Newton.
I know, right? Weird. And yet maybe pleasing to you too! Cause look at me getting all scholarly on you!
Anyhow, you’ll know Isaac was the greatest scientist ever, practically, or at least, one of the top three. He still hasn’t been voted off the show. Ha. That’s a reality TV reference. But listen.
HE WAS INTO ALCHEMY. Like, making metal into gold? Did you know this about Isaac Newton?
Nobody really knew it until the 1930s when Sotheby’s put a lot of his manuscripts up for sale. There were thousands of pages in Newton’s own handwriting, all about alchemy.
Look, I KNOW it’s my own fault for running away in the first place, and bringing Mum with me, but we don’t have much money right now. Practically none, in fact. And I can’t even tell you how boring it is, being poor. So when I read that Isaac was an alchemist, I thought maybe that was the reason I’d got obsessed with him in the first place. Like, he was going to teach me how to get rich again! So I’ve been reading a lot about alchemy.
At first, I was like, okay, cool, I just need to get me a fireplace and a crucible and some bunsen burners and, maybe, like a chemistry lab in a dungeon, and get down to some heating, distilling, grinding, dissolving and so on.
But pretty quickly I started to see problems.
E.g. you need the Philosopher’s Stone. I think that’s a chunk of rock. I think it’s red. And you need it to make gold. But where is it? Where?
Also, possibly bigger problem. There’s not a single piece of proof that alchemy ever worked. So I might be wasting my time.
I guess if it DID work, it’d be daft for alchemists to go around shouting: ‘We’ve figured out how to make gold! You just do blah and blah and you’ve got it!’ Cause then everyone would do blah and blah, and if everyone’s got gold, it stops BEING gold. If you see what I mean. It’s as common as blades of grass. Grass can be a very nice green but no girlfriend’s going to go, ‘OMG, this necklace is pure blades of grass, this is the best birthday ever!’
So maybe it did work and they kept it secret. Which brings me to the next problem, which is that all the alchemy books are written in code. Those alchemists were into secrecy like Mum’s into chocolate. They had secret clubs, they called each other code names (Isaac’s was an anagram of his own name in Latin), they met at secret locations. They invented their own alphabets, they spoke in metaphors and riddles. Their alchemy books sound like someone tripping, or like a kid who’s been given a list of random spelling words and told to make a story out of them. So they’re all about frogs and toads, three-headed serpents, the green lion, the king clad in purple with a golden crown, the grey wolf, the unicorn, the white rose, the red rose, the black rose, butterflies, three-headed eagle, fire-breathing dragon, black raven, the phoenix, the moon gliding into the sea . . .
Very nice and poetic, I’m sure, but also a language I don’t speak.
Anyhow, so I’m reading these alchemy books and slamming into problems everywhere I turn, and then I read that alchemy is not just about making gold. It’s also about the elixir of life. An elixir is like a medicine, but the elixir of life is the key to immortality.
So then I felt stupid and ashamed for having thought that alchemy was a message sent to make me rich. In my last letter to you I told you I was scared about Mum, and that I thought she was sick. Turned out that was an understatement. She had a brain tumour. She’s okay now, but you know, those things can come back. I’m living in this constant terror of it coming back, to be honest. I think she’s okay—I mean she hasn’t been acting weird (or not more weird than her regular self) or getting headaches or anything. But it could happen. And if alchemy can make an elixir of life, that’s exactly what I need to cure Mum.
And then FINALLY (don’t worry, this letter which you are probably not reading—which you have probably sent right back to me—this letter is about to end)—well, I discovered something else about alchemy. Something sort of blindingly important. It’s about the self. It’s like, it’s not just making an elixir for your body and transforming metal into gold. It’s an elixir to cure your SOUL—it’s transforming yourself into the best that you can be.
And that brings me to my point. I know I was wicked and wild, and I caused you a lot of stress, and cost you a lot of money. I’ve hurt people a lot by running away. So the question is, have I changed? Like cured my soul of the evil, and become a sort of gold version of myself?
In some ways, yes. I don’t sneak out in the night, well, that’s not true, I did that all the time for a while, but only to talk to a parking meter (don’t ask, that’s another story). But I’m not breaking laws or running away or partying, and I’m doing my homework, and reading a lot, and (I THINK, I HOPE), I am thinking about other people instead of just myself.
But in some ways, no. I have not changed. I think I’ve always been searching for something kind of amazing and magical. You know how I said that Sotheby’s put Newton’s alchemy papers up for auction? Well, the economist, Maynard Keynes, bought them all. I guess he was rich, being economically minded. He gave a speech about the papers, and here’s a line from his speech:
‘Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians.’
If Isaac Newton, one of the greatest scientists of all time, was a magician—if he believed in magic, why shouldn’t I?
Listen, Dad, I grew up thinking that YOU were a magician. I have never felt so alone in my life right now. It’s like all I do is stare at myself in the mirror. But, like I said, I still believe in magic. Please, prove me right and come and find us.
Love,
Madeleine
P.S. This letter is not about trying to get money. Mum wants nothing from you. She wants us to make it on our own.
P.P.S. This sounds stupid, but I think maybe there’s something wrong with ME now—I mean, physically wrong? I keep getting nose bleeds. I keep seeing weird things, like hallucinations. I mean, I’ve seen Leonardo da Vinci, Vivaldi and Newton, so maybe this is just my subconscious telling me I should cut out all the reading, or I should pursue an academic career in history. But still. It’s scaring me. A lot.
13
After she posted the letter to her father, Madeleine felt a strange calm melting through her. She carried the calm around, and watched colours fade and pale. She still looked at the parking meter in the laneway each day, but it began to resemble any other meter. It was crooked and out-of-order, but it was no longer a gateway to the Kingdom of Cello. There were never any slivers of white paper there. Elliot and his Kingdom were sealed away, gone.
One Saturday afternoon there was a flurry of snow and she cycled down the laneway, concentrating on the slipperiness, without even considering her parking meter. She stopped when she realised what she’d done, and backed up. Then she gazed at it for a long time: at its bright white snow cap, and the fine tracings of white lining its seams and edges, and its damp metallic greys and blues, and at the absence of cra
cks of paper.
This was how you said goodbye.
Then, as she watched, a glimpse of paper appeared, bright and defiant. It hesitated then slid right out. She reached a gloved hand to catch it, her heart crashing like a drumkit.
Madeleine,
Urgent. We need your help again. Speak here tonight at midnight?
Keira
1
The blindfold caught in Elliot’s hair while the girl, Chime, was tying it.
Her hands were gentle as they disentangled the hair, and then sharp again while tightening the knot.
Now it was just him and the blindfold. The deep blackness of it, the soft coolness, the close pull of its binding. It’s all come down to this, he thought. It’s nothing but me in a blindfold.
‘Can you see?’
‘No.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Can’t see a thing.’
He felt the light change as she moved from behind him. Now her voice came from the side. ‘How many fingers am I holding up?’
Elliot paused.
‘Is this scientific?’ he asked.
They both laughed.
A mild chuckle joined their laughter. It was the Assistant. That was the crowded smell of him: apricot-scented shampoo, leather coat, salted cashew nuts.
‘It’ll be fine,’ the Assistant said. ‘It’s a first-rate blindfold.’
The Assistant’s hand fell on Elliot’s shoulder.
‘You know the rules?’
‘I do.’
‘Blindfold doesn’t come off until she tells you. Follow her instructions to the letter. Back here in under an hour?’
Elliot nodded.
‘And keep a firm hold on this.’ Rope was pressed into his palm.
‘Wrap it around your hand,’ Chime suggested.
He did so, liking the rope’s dry roughness, finding the soft frayed end with the tip of his thumb.
‘Stay close behind me,’ said Chime. ‘Don’t make a sound.’
Elliot nodded again. Each time his head moved there were busy scritching sounds: the blindfold rubbing against his scalp and hair.
‘Ready?’ said the Assistant.
He hadn’t seen the sky for more than a month. ‘Ready?’ he said. ‘You’re kidding, right?’
The Assistant chuckled again. ‘Go on then. Have a blast.’
There was a series of beeps. A quiet rolling. The exit door slid open.
2
Five weeks earlier, Elliot had woken into darkness.
The sounds of breathing. The turn of a body on a mattress.
He was on a bed. A thin pillow. He was wearing someone else’s t-shirt and boxer shorts. These fell uncertainly against his skin. The room was deep in darkness. He propped himself up to look over the side of the bed at the floor, but too much darkness fell too far: a rush of vertigo.
It’s a bunk bed, he told himself. You’re on a bunk bed.
Abruptly, a light shone in his eyes.
He closed his eyes.
This is me, he told himself, Elliot Baranski, and right away he felt that as a physical weight. His own name was climbing onto him, clambering awkwardly onto his chest, waiting to see what he would do. He tilted, trying to tip it off.
Well, now, that’s crazy, he thought.
As far as he recalled, he’d never had to shift under the weight of his own name before. Generally, his name—his self—fit him so fine he didn’t notice it.
The light was still there. He could sense it from behind his eyelids. A fine pencil-line of light.
He opened his eyes again.
Someone was shining a flashlight at him.
‘You’ll be awake now,’ murmured a girl’s voice.
He squinted but could only make out a vague form. She was just across from him. On a bunk bed too, he guessed, only she was sitting up.
He tried to sit, but a surge of something else came over him. This was genuinely physical, only again he couldn’t figure it. It was a mild throbbing, for a start, in his shoulders and his lower back. Also a dull pain in his gums and sinuses, and weirdly enough, behind his ears. But it was more than just a catalogue of aches, it was a sense of being totally, physically beat. As if he’d been working in the fields without a break for a week. Hammering for days, leaping endless deftball furrows, felling trees, sawing wood, partying all night.
‘You are Elliot Baranski,’ said the girl.
There it was again, his name. He felt it press harder, dig its elbows into his kidneys.
‘You’ve been in the World,’ she continued. ‘You remember that?’
He thought about it.
‘I remember a gas station,’ he said. ‘I remember walking a long way. My dad in a doorway.’ He stopped. He stared into the darkness. He kept right on staring. ‘After that,’ he said, ‘I’ve got nothing.’
‘Well, that’ll be you forgetting yourself,’ she told him. ‘A person changes, I am hearing, when a person goes to the World. Changes into another. If you return before that other you has set, you lose it all.’
That was a Nature Strip accent, Elliot realised. The words turning in on themselves, an almost eerie remoteness, those skids into harshness. But her voice was also soft and low and—
‘My name is Chime.’
That was disconcerting. She’d spoken the exact adjective he was about to apply to her voice. Chiming. Now it seemed as if he, personally, had named her. He felt light-headed with the power.
‘That’s quite a name,’ he said eventually.
‘My mother was from the Sjakertaat. It’s common there.’
‘But you sound Nature-Strippian.’
Now he saw the shape of her moving slightly, and the hand that was holding the flashlight waved, indicating the space of the room.
‘There are eight of us here—nine now, for you also are here—and we are the regulars of this compound. We have come from all over Cello.’
The thin thread of light moved around the room and he caught glimpses of concrete floor. The room was rectangular, walls lined with bunks, a narrow strip between them. He saw rumples of blankets, mounds of sleeping people, some large and bulky, some curled and neat, now and then an arm or foot half-slipping from covers.
‘That is where we hang our jackets,’ Chime concluded. ‘Hooks on the wall.’
But she had turned the light back onto him before he could admire the hooks.
There was an important question he had to ask, only . . . he got it.
‘Why am I here?’
‘We are keeping you here for your protection, and if we are not, then the W.S.U. would be finding out you are alive, and they would be after the killing of you, for that you were communicating with a girl from the World, and so you must be dead again.’
Elliot waited. His mind was catching up with her words.
‘These are the things that I know of you,’ Chime added.
But did Elliot know these things of himself? He’d communicated with the World? Seriously?
Of course he had.
The sculpture in the high school grounds. Late-night conversations in notes. Madeleine.
So, yeah, that part was true. He ticked that off.
And yes, he also recalled, the W.S.U. had found out.
Choppers. A chase.
He’d fallen off a cliff’s edge, and fallen through to the World.
Now he was here.
‘What is this place?’ he said.
‘It is a Hostile compound. You are amongst Hostiles.’
Everything froze, then instantly set fire. A Hostile compound? He grabbed at pieces in his memory: Hostiles were revolutionaries; they were stealthy, violent, heck, they were killers!
He was forcing this, he realised. His fear was mostly theoretical. The ache in his muscles and bones, the weird pressure of his own name on his chest—those were plenty real. As for terror about Hostiles—well, who had the room for that, to be honest. He set that aside. He’d feel it later.
‘We will not harm you,’
Chime added. ‘We are protecting you. Not that I think you are afraid.’
Once again he flinched at the confluence of their thoughts.
‘But why?’ Elliot asked. ‘I mean, it’s good of you and all, to keep me safe, but I’m just some kid from the Farms, and aren’t you guys tied up bringing down a monarchy?’
That was maybe risky, saying that. Maybe disrespectful? He hadn’t planned it; it sort of rolled out as he recalled what the Hostiles were about.
But the girl, Chime, answered his question thoughtfully.
‘We are,’ she agreed, ‘but this is another thing I know of you. That you are friends with the girl, Keira. And it is Keira who has arranged for your protection here. You are the first non-Hostile ever to breathe between these walls, but Keira asked us to do it, and Keira is a person of much influence with us.’
Here came another set of memories unfolding. Keira—the Royal Youth Alliance . . .
He was too weary to follow that path any further.
‘Where are we?’ he asked.
‘In a Hostile compound. As I said.’
‘No, I mean, where is the compound?’
‘This, and I cannot tell you.’
Elliot sighed. His mind was in that many pieces. He didn’t see how he could put it back together without knowing exactly where his body was. You need a starting point, someplace to tether yourself.
‘Well, what province am I in?’
‘This, and I cannot tell you.’
‘I can’t even know what province I’m in?’
‘You cannot.’
‘As soon as it’s daylight, I’ll figure it out.’
‘You will not,’ Chime informed him. ‘We have no windows. And you will not be stepping outside of the doors.’
‘You want to put money on that?’
‘You will not be stepping outside of the doors,’ Chime repeated. ‘Now that you are here, you cannot leave except in a state of unconsciousness. Artificially induced, of course—hopefully. A non-Hostile may never know the location of a Hostile compound. How are you thinking we got you here? You were injected with the maximum dose of seventh-level Green. Only now, three days later, you have woken.’
A Tangle of Gold Page 6