Strange Alchemy

by Gwenda Bond

  “You’re Dr. John Dee, then?” I ask.

  Sidekick’s tail thumps a couple of times in acknowledgement of my presence. Even the dog seems nervous.

  Bone has stopped next to me, still cradling Mom’s body. Dr. Whitson pushes past his son to get to John Dee. “I’ll do the introductions,” he starts, but Dee sidesteps the doc without a hint of interest in him.

  “I had no idea Eleanor’s Virginia had survived,” Dee says, wonder and disdain mixing. “She was a seed of a thing, and the natives were… what’s the expression? Restless. Owing to you.” He focuses the accusation on Miranda, whose only reaction is to continue to scowl at him. Finally he turns to me, frowning. “Why have you bound the hands of Virginia Dare’s descendant? Why is he here at all? The child is not one of mine. Her parents are.”

  “I’m not one of yours either,” Miranda points out.

  Dee only looks at her again.

  I need to distract him. I hold up my tied hands, jerk my head toward Bone. “I’d like to take my mother now, please.”

  Dee reaches into the pocket of the jacket he wears. When his hand emerges, long fingers hold the handle of a short, sharp knife. He moves forward, smooth as a shark, and slices through the ropes that bind me. The thick cords fall away. A single cut shouldn’t have done it.

  Dee untrusses Miranda with the same quick motion, and she quickly backs away. Despite that, Dee appears pleased. I watch the way he studies his hand with approval before returning the knife to his pocket.

  “Getting comfortable in there?” I ask.

  Dee turns to me. “It’s a process. Like all transmutations, one does not simply achieve success in a moment. After being in the starless void for so long, I find I am in no rush. Each sensation is a new discovery.”

  Whitson lets out a murmur of approval, and the adoration he manages to cram into the sound turns my stomach. How did I ever trust that guy?

  Miranda is edging slowly further into the house with Sidekick. I don’t know where she’s headed, but I can keep Dee occupied a little longer. Hands free, I accept my mother’s weight from Bone.

  “What’s wrong with her?” I ask Dee.

  Dee reaches out with his borrowed fingers and tenderly touches the side of Mom’s chalked face. “She is unaffiliated,” he says, “which means I can aid her, if you wish.” He finds Dr. Whitson then, and the professor squints like the sun is shining in his eyes. Like he’s seeing something holy.

  “You have the invention?” Dee asks him, sounding irritated.

  “Right here.” Whitson snaps open his leather valise and produces the bundle eagerly. He’s wrapped the heavy metal weapon in a fusty afghan throw.

  “Remove the cloth,” Dee orders, his nose wrinkling.

  Dr. Whitson quickly complies, and the gun lies flat, exposed, against the nubby plaid throw. It’s a dream made in metal. This man’s dream.

  One of the sewing women gets up and walks to Dee’s side. She wears a summer dress, long and flowing, and small sandals that seem out of place with such a stiff gait. The gun must be difficult for her to ignore, but she does.

  “Master,” she says, “I need to go now, or he will suspect.”

  “Of course.” Dee raises his voice. “Any of you whose vessels possess family should go to them now. You can return here tomorrow.”

  “I would rather not go back there,” says a woman who can’t be older than her mid-twenties.

  “I understand that what I ask of you is not easy, but one more day and then such concerns will leave us.”

  The woman nods, and all but two leave through the front door. They drape the materials they’re working on over the chair backs on their way out, giving the furniture the appearance of cloth gravestones.

  Dee gestures for me to follow him. “Bring her this way.”

  I can’t believe I’m taking this guy’s orders. I also can’t believe Dee is being so calm and rational. I expected a fiery, beyond-the-grave menace. Don’t trust, the shades whisper, don’t trust — don’t trust — don’t trust. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between the other voices and my own thoughts.

  This is one of those times.

  As we pass a kitchen, I spot three doughnut boxes — nothing but a few crumbs of frosting left inside — on the counter. No doughnuts in the starless void, then.

  “Eleanor,” Dee calls, his voice carrying through the silent house, “keep an eye on my M… Miranda, please.”

  A woman answers from a room at the far end of the hall. “She’s right here,” she says.

  Satisfied, Dee motions me through a nearby door. Inside the room, I put Mom down on the bed. I straighten her legs on the pink bedspread, wishing again for her not to be part of this.

  Dee eases down onto the side of the bed beside her and touches her face again. The bedside lamp’s light gives the white mask she wears hollows and shadows, like she’s already becoming one of the spirits.

  “Miranda shot me with your gun too,” I say. “All it did was coat me with black dust. Why didn’t this happen to me?”

  Dee spots Whitson lingering in the door. “Leave us,” Dee commands.

  I watch the doctor swallow his protest. Obediently, he goes. I figure Bone must be hanging out with the women who stayed. He probably isn’t much for sewing, though.

  “She shot you?” Dee asks, his pupils large and black. “Of course, she did.”

  I note the moony quality that crosses Dee’s face when he’s talking about Miranda. Maybe he and Mary Blackwood were closer than I previously assumed. I’m relieved when all traces of creepy adoration vanish as he goes on.

  “You were never in danger because Virginia was too young to follow her parents through the veil, into the void. She stayed behind. Too young for a decision, so the decision was made by her inability. You share her blood… with a curiously strong tie given the years that separate you. Regardless, it protected you.”

  “Her parents just left her behind?”

  “Mortality is fleeting. Immortality is a promise of the eternal, pure as light itself.”

  I imagine a tiny girl on a huge beach, a wilderness surrounding her. They must have assumed she would die in minutes, hours, days. That’s some funny idea of light and purity.

  “But my mother — she hasn’t chosen?” I’m solving the riddle. “You said you can help her because she’s unaffiliated.”

  Dee says nothing. He watches as I put things together.

  “You can help her if you offer her a choice. If she chooses you.” I draw in a shaky breath. “You can only help her if she becomes one of yours.”

  Dee strokes Mom’s chalky skin. She’s so pale, a ghost, fading fast into nothing.

  “Yes,” he says. “That is correct.”

  He’s the devil, one of the voices whispers. But it’s not like I need the spirits to tell me that. I already know.

  Chapter 31

  MIRANDA

  I find Polly easily. She’s in her room, sitting on the bed and bent over a long swath of fabric like the other women. As I watch, she curses, and her lips pinch in a universal ouch.

  Sidekick stays so close to me I can feel his cringe at the word. I wish I were better at protecting what I love, better at understanding that my circumstances are not of my own making — or of Dad’s. I wish I could have seen all this coming early enough to stop it.

  Polly has angled the shade of the lamp to give herself as much light as possible, but it clearly isn’t enough. She doesn’t appear to notice my presence until Dee’s voice — Dad’s but deeper and more commanding, with a clipped accent — calls out for Eleanor. At the word, Polly’s familiar face looks up, exhaustion painted on it, and confirms I’m with her.

  “You knew I was here,” I say.

  “This body has excellent hearing.” Polly jams the needle through the fabric, cursing again as she sticks herself.
It’s the most inept attempt at sewing I’ve ever seen.

  “You came in here because you didn’t want the others to see how much you suck at this,” I say.

  “Perceptive,” Polly says. “I was neither a housewife nor a tailor nor anything else but my father’s protégée. The favored daughter of Governor White. Of those of us who traveled to make the New London, to bring about the great transformation, I was the most skilled next to Master Dee.”

  I’m close enough to see the tips of Polly’s fingers are coated with red where she’s repeatedly stabbed herself. I now know that Eleanor Dare — Virginia’s mother, a speaking part, not a footnote — is inside that injured skin, but somehow that doesn’t matter. It’s Polly’s body.

  “Let me,” I say, taking the fabric before she can protest.

  I sit on the bed and hold out my hand for the needle and thread. I start to ask what they’re making, but then realize, with a stroke over the cloth, that I already know. A vision crosses my mind — the returned people in the square, arms drifting through the air, reunited with flesh and each other after so many years.

  Cloaks. They’re sewing the cloaks from my dream.

  After a moment’s hesitation, Polly hands over the needle, the rough red of her fingertips painful to look at.

  I accept it and fit the needle through the cloth again and again. I’ve helped the costumers enough on similar pieces that it’s old habit. Sidekick slides down at my feet, letting gravity pull his eyes closed. Polly watches with a puzzled expression.

  “Why are you helping me? Your friend is not in here. She is in the void.”

  “My friend,” I say, focusing on the easy motion of the needle, the satisfying push through the fabric, “still exists. That’s enough.”

  If only it was true.

  We sit in silence while I sew. I know she’s only staying here because Dee told her to keep an eye on me.

  At last, I bite the thread loose and tie it, then hold up the garment. The fabric billows like a storm cloud in miniature when I shake out the cloth. It’s about the best a sinister gray cloak can be, in my opinion.

  Polly plucks the cloak from my fingers and sweeps it around her own shoulders. She hooks a wide loop over a button she must have struggled to sew on. I didn’t do it.

  “Very Salem,” I say.

  “There is much to complete before tomorrow evening,” Polly says. “Will you do another?”

  I find myself nodding yes before I recall that this isn’t the real Polly. This isn’t the person I usually help without thinking, the person who lets me have a stage-side view of every show. The cape flutters behind Polly’s body as she leaves the room, before I can take back the yes. What is tomorrow evening? And where has Grant gone?

  Before I can wonder the same thing about my father’s body and its make-nice hitchhiker, he materializes in the doorway with a bolt of gray fabric. He raises his brows skeptically. “Eleanor said you asked for this.”

  Sidekick wakes from sleep and scoots behind my legs. I can relate. I’d like to get out of his sight too. I settle for staring at the floor. “I agreed to sew another for Polly’s sake.”

  Why do I feel the need to provoke him? This guy came back from the grave. I probably wouldn’t like him when he’s angry. But the insult of having to deal with Dad’s form is too fresh. I refuse to look at him.

  “Who actually killed him?” I ask, keeping my eyes down. “Was it you or Dr. Whitson? Or was it the ship?”

  Dee places the bolt of cloth on the bed beside me. He’s too close. I don’t move.

  Finally he backs off, settling into a wooden chair near the foot of the bed. I resist the urge to put more distance between us.

  “What if I told you it was none of those? That it was the curse he bore?”

  I pick up the cloth and shake it into position. The snake on my cheek feels like it’s crawling. “Then that means you — you or your ship. It’s your curse.”

  I unspool a bit of thread — filched from the costume department, without a doubt — and thread my needle. The fabric flows before me, a gray flood. I won’t look at him.

  “It must be difficult,” he says.

  Needle through fabric, needle through fabric, needle through fabric. I picture Mom hand sewing and long for the machine I inherited from her.

  Dee goes on. “Difficult to be so skilled but to continually experience setbacks. You do, don’t you? The other night at the theater must have been one.”

  You haven’t answered my question, I think. Why would I answer yours?

  I focus on folding a length of cloth over on itself to make a hem, a flash of silver as I poke the needle through. But the words are out before I can stop them. “How do you know that?”

  “You’ll have to forgive me,” he says.

  I hear echoes of Dad in those words, memories of all the times he said: “Forgive me, Miranda-bug.” “Forgive me, sweetie.” Or just: “I’m sorry.” But Dee’s words come with his clipped accent and crisp delivery.

  I stare at the cloth. I can feel him waiting for an answer, but I won’t look up. I refuse to. My fingers are so dedicated to their task they ache.

  “Forgive you for killing my father?” I ask. “I deserve a straight answer. You got his body somehow.”

  He doesn’t respond right away.

  Then, finally, “You were conflicted, weren’t you, when you discovered he was missing? We are not blind beyond, not unless we wish it. Where the veil thins, we can see light leaking through, can watch the lives on the other side as if through a curtain made of glass. Part of you was relieved, in that first moment, to discover your father might have passed beyond. I was watching.”

  My teeth grind together. So what if my whole body rose like hot air when I understood what Blue Doe’s reporting meant — that Dad might be missing? It was one stupid moment, passed in a heartbeat.

  “I didn’t know he was dead. I’m not that kind of person.”

  “You are a strong person. You knew it meant you could be free. And isn’t that what you’ve always longed for? For freedom?”

  I look up and over at him, finally. The sight of Dad’s face comes as a shock, even expecting it. Talking to him isn’t like talking to Dad. Looking at him is different too. He leans forward, watching me, his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped. He’s like a preacher waiting for a confession. My dad never sat like that in his life.

  “I never wanted him dead. Answer my question — which one of you killed him?”

  My attention goes back to my hands.

  “I wish I could make the answer simple. But it isn’t. Your father had to die. He bore the mark, the one that allowed me to return to his body. The reasons he bore that mark — the one now passed to you — are complicated. Suffice to say, your family owed me a debt. I consider that debt paid.”

  I hesitate, then stand, letting the cloth fall, tossing the needle onto the bedspread. “Then I can go, right? I can leave right now, and you won’t follow me? None of this will follow me. My debt is paid?”

  Dad’s eyes burn with regret. “I’m afraid not, not so long as you hold the mark. Your family will be a part of this as long as you wear it, as long as my soul lives.”

  “That’s what I thought.” I drop back, defeated, onto the side of the bed. I leave the stupid cloak-in-the-making where it lies.

  “No,” he says. “You misunderstand.”

  Dad — Dee — moves at the corner of my vision. My cringe away from him is automatic, but he sits down beside me on the bed anyway. The snake burns and squirms against my cheek, and then my entire skin becomes the snake. Surely, with the way my arms and legs crawl at his closeness, I will shed it. This is the opposite of what being close to Grant feels like. Every instinct screams at me to exit, leave, run.

  Sorry, instinct.

  I sit my ground, keeping some pride by making no effor
t to disguise my discomfort. He won’t need to spy through any glass curtain or veil to see it.

  “You look so like her,” he says. He lifts a hand.

  I hope he doesn’t have any designs on touching me with those fingers. I won’t meet his eyes. Sidekick whines.

  “Don’t,” I say. But I realize from his slip at the door who he must mean. “You’re talking about my ancestor, Mary?”

  Dee nods once. “It tells me that the grand design brought us all here. The angels spoke in my ear when I was alive and told me it would all come to pass as it was meant to. And now the boy with his connection to Virginia is here. And you, so clearly of Mary’s line. The fullness of time has brought us to perfection. This moment was always the right one.”

  I miss the meaning of some of what he says, but his joy is unmistakable. Maybe his inappropriate good mood will make him more inclined to help Sara. I assume she’s still somewhere in her unnatural sleep. Grant would have found me to tell me if she woke up.

  “If you help Grant’s mom, Sara, it would make up for what you did to Mary. At least some.” I hesitate. “Why did you curse her?”

  And my family. Me.

  “I was angry then,” he says. For a long moment, he says nothing else. “You are a fresh chance to be better than that rage. A gift for our homecoming. An auspicious sign.”

  “No, I’m not.” I don’t trust the soft tone of sympathy, of care, that he uses. He’s making it sound like he cares for me.

  “I can take this away.” Dee’s finger traces the mark down my cheek, a bolt of heat smashing into me like a wall of fire.

  My skin must really be coming off this time. It will melt onto the floor at my feet, and I’ll be nothing but blood and bones, like the story Mom told at the Halloween bonfire the year before she died, the flickering light playing over her features and making them unfamiliar. Bloody Bones, coming for you. Bloody Bones takes naughty children to his dirty pen, and they are never seen again.