Strange Alchemy

by Gwenda Bond

  “You didn’t mean to,” he says. “It was an accident.”

  I didn’t mean to. He’s right about that. But there was a terrible moment, right after the gun was fired, when I felt two things in equal measure:

  The first feeling was my own, shock at seeing Sara lying on the floor. The second was worse, a gloating sense that I had accomplished a goal. That wasn’t mine, but I felt it all the same.

  The letter got it right.

  I betrayed Grant and Sara. I betrayed myself.

  *

  I insist on riding in the backseat and cradle Sara’s head in my lap while Grant drives. He can barely drive the stick shift, but he manages.

  When we reach Roswell’s house, the driveway is vacant, and the windows are dark. By all appearances, no one is home. Roswell could be anywhere — in town eating dinner, doing interviews about the townspeople’s miraculous return, roaming around Fort Raleigh working on his theory.

  “Any change?” Grant turns off the car and shifts to check out how we’re doing.

  “She’s no better.” I stare to the left of him, not able to meet his eyes. But I want him to hear me. “I think you should stay here and let me take the car back out to the Grove. You’re better off on your own.”

  Grant doesn’t answer other than to get out of the car. I sigh, and then he’s opening the door and leaning down beside me. He won’t let me get away with telling the back of his head.

  “Sidekick will be fine,” he says. “We need to help Mom now.” He touches his mother’s hair.

  “You’re right. She has to be your priority, and you seem to be forgetting that I shot her. Grant, you were right. What you asked back there… how could I do that?”

  “It’s not going to be that easy,” he says.

  “What?”

  “Getting rid of me.” He holds up a hand to stop my objections. “When this is over and both my mom and you are safe, then you can get rid of me. Okay?”

  I say nothing. What can I say?

  A sudden gust of wind buffets Grant hard enough that he pitches forward. I raise my hand and it lands on his chest to steady him. A shadow falls over his face.

  “Look,” he says. The word slips out and his eyes dart around us.

  “At what?” I ask. But then I see and hear them. “The birds.”

  Above us, the sky is filled with a wheeling mass of uneven shapes. The frantic noise of their beating wings and screamed calls surrounds us. Grant stands, gaping, and I slide out from under his mother, placing her head gingerly on the seat.

  A few birds swoop lower, and the cries from the mass are like those of warriors in battle. The frenzy of their flight causes some of them to injure others, and a small bird drops from the sky to the ground a few feet away. In death, its dingy brown feathers droop like autumn leaves clinging to a tree limb. Its eye stares at nothing, a tiny unseeing bead on an invisible necklace.

  “They’re so frightened.” And so am I.

  “Something’s making them panic,” Grant says. He shuts the door to leave his mom safe inside the car. “Come on. Let’s get the door open and then I’ll come back for her.”

  As I watch, the mass of birds starts heading into the distance, still calling to each other in a panic. One last sad shape falls to earth. I don’t want to stay over here alone, so I nod.

  No one answers our knock, and Dr. Roswell’s security turns out to be a laugh — Grant gets past the front door lock with a debit card and fifteen seconds. “Old style locks like this barely exist anymore,” he says.

  Inside, the house is dark, empty.

  Grant states the obvious: “They’re not here.”

  I call out anyway. “Bone? Doctor?”

  No answer. I flinch when Grant brushes a strand of my hair off my cheek. His touch on the snake makes it throb.

  “You would never have hurt her on purpose. I know that much.” He puts his finger to my lips when I start to protest. “Shhh. We’ll figure out how to fix it.”

  I will pay for what I did, one way or another. But I don’t say it out loud.

  “But why was it different this time?” Grant continues. “Why the white dust? It didn’t smell the same either. No sulfur and charcoal. It looks like chalk and something else, maybe…”

  “Whatever it was, there was too much of it for the gun to hold, wasn’t there?”

  He frowns. “Now that you mention it… it was emptied once already, and you didn’t reload it with anything, right?”

  I shake my head no.

  He goes on, seeming to think out loud, “And why did it put her into a coma” — I must look like I’m about to have a heart attack because he says — “or a trance or whatever. Even a magic gun should be a little predictable.”

  I suddenly have a thought. “What’s different now than the first time I shot it?” I don’t wait for him to answer. “The differ-ence is that they’re here. They’re back. My dad — or Dee, the devil — he’s back.”

  “That doesn’t tell us how to wake up Mom, though.”

  “Maybe there’ll be something in Roswell’s papers. I’ll get started.” I cross the living room and pull up the hatch that leads to the library. “Go get your mom.” Then I’m gone, my feet thumping down the ladder. At least I have something to do. A purpose.

  A way to atone.

  There’s a light left on down here, thankfully, next to the table and chair where Roswell sat on our first visit. The book he showed us before lies open on the table, still turned to the page featuring John Dee’s portrait. He’s a perfect specimen of the kind of an old-fashioned noble. His thin face is framed by a high collar. A flush of color lights his cheeks in the portrait, pinched spots like the waxy skin of cherries. His eyes stare up at me, two black beetles about to crawl off the page.

  Maybe not the devil, but definitely a devil.

  The monas hieroglyphica mocks me from beneath him. In addition to the name and the fact that it’s Dee’s personal mark, the text says that the design represents the unity of the cosmos, each part standing in for the moon, the sun, or the elements.

  I close the book and move on to search Roswell’s desk. My neck warms like someone is here, watching me unseen. But the house is deserted, and Grant will be down any second.

  Behind the desk, I turn and face the room — empty.

  In front of me, the doctor’s desk is a mess of stacks and volumes and handwritten notes covering pages and pages, some lined and some not. On the ones that aren’t lined, sometimes there are diagrams and drawings, lines with arrows at the end or circles. They make no sense, the content of his research notes as jumbled as the material heaped before me.

  You’re alone… alone with Roswell’s fire hazard.

  There’s one tidy spot at the exact center of the desk. A single oversized journal with a weathered brown leather cover sits directly in front of Roswell’s chair. Its brass clasp is similar to the one on the box that housed Dee’s gun.

  Interesting.

  Based on its placement, I’m guessing it must be more important than the rest. I pick it up, then add another couple of legal pads and books to make a pile in my arms, just in case the journal isn’t the jackpot I want it to be.

  I select a spot and sprawl on the floor, setting the notebooks and research materials in a semicircle around me. My fingers trace the leather book’s cover, the surface cool and smooth. The snake on my face itches like a bug bite, and I scratch it.

  Then, snapping open the clasp, I flip open Roswell’s journal.

  I quickly realize something — the man is insane.

  Heavy globs of ink form scribbled out sections, bleeding into a sketch of John Dee. And there are notes. Lots and lots of notes. The key to their return? bumps up against The alchemist’s promise. There are names, including my ancestor Mary Blackwood’s. It’s small and circled, included in a short list of othe
rs, entitled Presumed Dead. The words SLEEPING POWER are written at the side of the sheet in all caps, circled in a repeated spiral.

  I hear movement from above. What will Grant make of this madman’s scrapbook? I know he respects Roswell, but this guy seriously needs a new hobby.

  I turn the page, noting that Roswell has pasted in some of John White’s paintings. Heavy ink highlights some sections of the art, with notes written messily beneath. A sketch of a Native American hunter from the period apparently concealed a message, which Roswell translated into: The promised land was to belong to him. Become the New London. The home of the Great Work.

  The next page features the detail of a flower and the legend, The boundary once crossed permits only one return. All must be in readiness.

  “Only one return too many,” I say.

  Flicking past a few more pages, I catch photocopied reproductions of letters with words underlined — weapon, prepare, bloodline — and then another page with two words connected by an arrow: Weapon ——> Immortality.

  I advance to the next page and find the one facing it blank. This is the last page Roswell used.

  Just then Grant climbs down the ladder. I don’t look up until he speaks.

  “That took forever…” he says. “I don’t want you to think I don’t work out, but, well, who has the time?”

  He’s giving me a little smile. I realize he’s playing the normal game. It’s one I often play in my regular life. The one where I pretend my day was fine, that whatever happened didn’t solidify my freak status.

  Peering over my shoulder, Grant says, “Whoa.”

  “Nice surfer impression, dude,” I say, playing along. After all, the normal game only works if other people play along. No one ever has for me.

  “Is that…” Grant’s expression darkens.

  “Yeah.” I wish I could calm down. “That’s me.”

  The sketch gazes up at us, rendered in Roswell’s too-heavy hand, my eyes enormous and black, the snake mark circled on the side of my cheek. The birthmark is more detailed than the other features, and for that I’m almost grateful.

  Almost.

  Being grateful is impossible, given the words at the end of the arrow that extends from the side of my face.

  THE CURSE SURVIVES

  Chapter 28

  GRANT

  I close the journal on the drawing and slip it from Miranda’s hands. “There’s no reason to think that’s the whole story,” I say.

  “Really?” she scoffs. “Because I feel like it tells us everything.”

  “No,” I say, sitting down in Whitson’s desk chair. “It doesn’t. We just need to figure out the context that makes sense of it.”

  “Good luck with that,” Miranda says. She perches on the side of the stiff leather chair beside the table and rummages the jeweled gun out of her bag.

  “What are you doing?” I ask.

  “Trying to make sense of this,” she says, squinting at it.

  There’s a resolve in her voice that makes me leave it alone. I can’t say anything without making it seem like I’m afraid she’ll accidentally discharge it again.

  I begin to look through the doctor’s journal, trying my hardest to decipher the meaning of the scrawls and artwork. There aren’t many spirits with us down here, and the ones that are meander, gray shadows circling, whispering. It’s not hard to shut them out by focusing on the pages.

  I flip through the journal again, the sequence of Whitson’s thoughts seeming almost… random. These are the questions — and some of the answers — that surfaced in his research. But the notes weren’t left for someone else to read. They’re the doctor’s notes for himself. But I don’t know his shorthand.

  What I do know is that Whitson clearly has a better view of how the pieces of Roanoke Island’s weird history fit together than we do.

  “No matter how many times you look, it’s still crazy,” Miranda says. “We should get out of here. Just bring it with us.”

  “He’s not crazy — this is his life’s work. An obsession, but he’s not crazy. I don’t think.”

  Miranda isn’t looking at me but still at the jeweled gun. Her hands turn it over and over again as she examines its mechanisms with steady, competent deliberation. She stares down its barrel, and my heart pounds.

  “Miranda, what are you doing again?”

  Her focus on the twisted, hammered metal is complete. “According to Roswell, this equals immortality. I’m trying to see how it works.”

  It would never have occurred to me to spend time dissecting the firearm. I’m better with books, with messes people make with their minds. My ancestors and whatever spirits are around continue to whisper, but I’d swear they’re talking to each other, not me. I can think, but it’s not helping.

  “I don’t get it,” I say. When Miranda’s forehead wrinkles in question, I clarify, “Immortality.”

  She holds the gun closer to the lamp on the table, a gem on the grip flashing under the light from the bulb. “What do you mean?”

  “It’s such a bad idea. If everyone lives forever — well, just imagine it. Imagine if every person lived forever. For that matter, add every creature.” I’ve never talked to anyone like this, not even Whitson, without wondering whether they’ll think I’m nuts. “Earth would be overrun. We’d be out of resources to deal with it in a blink of geological time. And then you get all the doom and gloom. Rationing, wars, et cetera.”

  “Et cetera?” Miranda half smiles, but she’s completely serious when she looks over. “I understand it — sort of. It’s not about living forever. It’s about not dying. To be able to keep the people you love around forever? I understand that.” She shrugs and frowns at the trigger, rubbing her thumb across the hammered metal.

  From what I understand of Dr. Whitson’s journal, love isn’t any part of Dee’s motives. The alchemist identified the North Carolina coast as a place he could experiment on his band of witches and attempt to turn himself — and them — immortal using the weapon he made. If that worked, the island was to be his launching ground to lash out at the world, to take down the queen herself. When his plan went south, Dee and White hid messages in paintings and letters, messages Dr. Whitson has managed to tease out. He had a number of White’s personal letters to Dee, but only a few replies from the alchemist-in-chief.

  Some people believe Sir Walter Raleigh and Queen Elizabeth had a not-so-secret romantic connection, whether they acted on it or not. At least according to the reading I’ve done on the era. Watching Miranda, I decide Raleigh wouldn’t have liked Dee going after his girlfriend’s empire. Raleigh must have been Dee’s unknowing pawn all along.

  The page under my hand features a sketch of a doorway surrounded by trees, bald cypress trunks like fingers reaching out of the ground. According to the handwriting scrawled around the image, Dee had given the settlers — the ones who “followed him true and were promised” — detailed instructions for traveling past the veil of reality to the place of spirits. There, they could wait as long as they had to for someone to reassemble the plan, to bring them back and complete Dee’s agenda. Their lives beyond were tied to the island, not so different than mine and Miranda’s.

  Dee intended to follow the colonists into the spirit waiting room after his own death, and he must have succeeded. I see shadows from beyond this veil, apparently, but as far as I can tell, they’re not distinguishable as individual people. Still, I’m almost certain I’ve never seen him. He’s playing a long game, and I’m afraid he’s winning. There isn’t enough here to come up with a strategy to even compete.

  The sigh of frustration is out before I can stop it. “What’s in here, it’s not everything.”

  “How do you know?”

  “These are mainly background details. Whitson must have another notebook somewhere,” I say, drumming my fingers. “There are too many important th
ings missing — like how to trigger the right conditions to bring the settlers back into our reality. And not much from Dee’s own hand.”

  Even more telling, the Blackwoods are barely mentioned in this journal, which I don’t want to say to Miranda. I’m still not sure how her family fits in to all this, what the traitor thing Gram wrote about translates to. Dee has a grudge against them — or does he? Was Mary Blackwood left behind just so he’d have a vessel to inhabit when he returned? Whitson claimed she was an alchemist like the rest. That makes it sound like she was on Dee’s side, not any sort of traitor.

  Or maybe that meant she was a traitor to humanity. I’m not about to voice that possibility out loud.

  “You’re right,” Miranda says, peering over my shoulder. “There’s nothing too specific in there — it’s more chaos than theory.”

  “There’s also nothing too specific about the weapon.” Which means nothing about how to heal Mom from its effects. I suspect Dee is the only one who knows how the unpredictable gun in Miranda’s hand works. His magic created it, after all.

  “We can’t put off leaving much longer,” Miranda says. “It’s too dangerous for your mom.”

  “Where will we go?” I ask, though I’m afraid I know the answer.

  “Dee’s got to be the only one who can help her. I think I have to go to my new and improved father and ask him.”

  “I don’t want you to. I’ll do it.” After all, what if Dee can’t or won’t help? And even if he does, what will be his price?

  Miranda doesn’t respond right away, instead stashing the gun inside her bag and folding over the flap. She gets up and paces along a bookshelf at the other end of the library from the desk.

  “Grant,” she says, “I know this will be hard for you. You want to be my knight in… well, we don’t have any armor, and that’s part of the problem. We’re way overmatched. I’m dealing with a curse hundreds of years old that makes this place loathe me and vice versa, and that makes you my enemy. You’re sworn to put the island first.”