Dark Alchemy

by Laura Bickle

  Petra’s eyes narrowed. “What makes you say that?”

  The shopkeeper pointed to the symbols. “Those are alchemical symbols, and the markers of the cardinal directions associated with the ancient elements: earth, air, fire, and water.”

  Petra’s heart leapt into her mouth. “What about the lion and the sun?”

  “In the symbolism of alchemists, the lion is tied to the sun. This is the true green lion, and his devouring of the sun symbolizes the transformation of unpurified material.”

  Petra swallowed. She’d heard that before, from Gabriel. Unconsciously, her fingers flitted up to the medallion from her father, hidden beneath her shirt collar. “What is it?”

  Stan shook his head. “I don’t know. Some kind of ward or talisman, maybe. There’s somebody I can ask to appraise it, though, if you want to leave it here.”

  Petra didn’t like how the old man’s hands curled possessively around the edges of the compass. “I’ll bring it back later,” she said, prying it from his fingers. She tucked it away in her pocket and gathered her bags.

  “Thanks for your help, Stan.”

  “Sure. Come back anytime.”

  The door banged shut behind her with the chime of bells, but Petra couldn’t shake the feeling of the old man’s gaze on her back. She stood to the left of the door, listening, the hair prickling on the back of her neck. There was a space of silence, the sound of a rotary-­dial phone churning, and then Stan’s voice.

  “Stroud, this is Stan. I saw something today that I think you’d want. Something that would fit right into your collection.”

  Stan began to describe the piece and where it had come from. “It looks like a compass, but with the Prima Materia lion in the center. Cardinal directions, the seven rays on it. Looks like gold to me. Customer said that it was found on Lascaris’s old property. I dunno if she’d sell it.” There was a pause, and what Stan said next was unintelligible. Then she heard him say, “With the new girl. Petra Dee. Yeah. Her last name is Dee. So?”

  The man named Stroud must have hung up, because there was a very long pause after that, followed by the sound of the receiver being put down and Stan muttering, “That girl’s gonna need those six-­shooters.”

  Petra slunk away from the shadow of the store, unable to shake the chill of sweat tracing down her neck.

  Chapter Six

  Fool’s Gold

  “Hey. Get your asses to the south field.”

  Gabe wound barbed wire tightly around a fence post, looked back to see Sal Rutherford clomping toward him. Ravens pecking at the shiny wire coils skittered away at his approach, fluffing their feathers and cawing. The rest of the ranch hands working on the fence, setting posts and winding wire, stopped. They turned silently toward Sal, then looked to Gabe.

  Gabe stripped off his gloves. “We’re not done here.”

  “Doesn’t matter. We’ve got a problem in the south field.”

  Gabe’s eyes narrowed. “What problem?”

  Sal’s mouth thinned. “We’re shorthanded. I lost a dozen balers.”

  “Lost?” he echoed.

  “They left. Deserted, after they found another corpse.”

  “Like the last one—­skeletonized?”

  Sal looked away. Gabe could see sweat trickling down his brow. He reeked of fear. “The balers took off before getting too close to it . . . they didn’t say. They were seasonal workers.” Seasonal workers came and went on the ranch. There weren’t enough of Gabe’s men to do all the work this time of year. Gabe knew Sal disliked having outsiders around, but it was a necessary evil.

  Gabe tucked his gloves in his belt. “What do you want us to do about it?”

  “Take care of it. And when you’re done, finish where they left off. Bale the hay they left standing out there before it rains.”

  Gabe stared at him. The other men didn’t move. They didn’t look to Sal first for direction. Instead, they watched Gabe. There was a curious vacancy in their gazes, as if some of the soul behind their eyes had been drained out. Some, more than others. But they were useful, in their way. Labor for Sal. Company for Gabe, of a steadfastly silent sort.

  Gabe gave a curt nod, and the men left their work behind, climbing into the backs of pickup trucks. They left the barbed wire where it lay, in coils snaking around loose posts. Gabe sat in the back of one of the trucks, wondering at what they might find.

  He rubbed the side of his face that had been bleeding just yesterday. His skin had been knit whole, smooth and tanned as if he’d never been struck. He ran his fingers over the skin, willing himself to feel some of that pain. It had hurt, to be sure. Maybe that’s why he let it happen. It had been the most exhilarating, real sensation he’d felt in a very long time.

  Almost. The curiosity the woman had piqued in him was just as real. He’d seen the alchemical symbol on the medallion she wore before, mostly in the hands of strangers who occasionally came to Temperance searching for Lascaris’s alchemical secrets. Those ­people inevitably became sucked into the Alchemist’s mysteries and vanished.

  But this woman had none of the metallic tang of magic about her. She seemed . . . ordinary. And Gabe wondered what she wanted.

  The truck bumped over the fields, rattling tools and teeth as it went, toward the south field. The hay had been mown, and much of it baled. Gabe directed the driver to stop where the line of bales faded away into the fallen grass line, where the balers had abandoned their work. Pitchforks and baling hooks glimmered where they had been cast aside.

  His mouth pressed into a grim slash. He hoped that after telling Sal about the body, the deserters had just left, in silence. He hoped that they wouldn’t linger around town, that they wouldn’t talk. Because if they did, he was certain that Sal would order Gabe’s men to take care of them, too. And there would be more bodies to bury.

  He hopped down from the back of the truck, snatched a pitchfork. He scanned the golden field, searching for what had spooked the men. Ranch workers—­of any kind—­were a hardy sort. Death was common enough out here. It had to be bad to convince them to flee.

  Hay had been pushed by the wind into jagged rills and valleys. Gabe waded through the field, smelling the sweetness of grass and sunshine. But he could sense magic beneath the straw, moving and flowing, something foreign. Something that didn’t belong here.

  A raven waddled before him, poking through the fallen grasses for something to eat or something shiny to hoard. The bird stuck its head into a stand of grass, ducked back into the light. It shook out its tail feathers and looked back at Gabe with obsidian eyes.

  Gale paused before the spiky structure the raven had been investigating. The raven scuttled away from it, hopping and flapping. It cawed an alarm to its fellows. The birds in the field took wing, squawking as they took to the white sky.

  Gabe poked at the uneven hay with his pitchfork, gently moving the stalks aside. As if he were an archaeologist excavating a mummy, he brushed aside tendrils of grasses to reveal . . . a scarecrow. That was the closest word in his vocabulary that could describe it—­a scarecrow bent by a windstorm. The suggestion of the shape of a man was twisted in the grass, rendered in pale bone that splintered and twisted like ocean coral, pocked and fused at unnatural angles. There was no skin, no flesh or meat, as if it had been picked clean. Grotesquely elongated fingers wound around ribs that melted together. Grass poked through the eye sockets and the spaces between vertebrae. It was as if someone had left the wax figure of a man in the sun for hours and pulled it apart, like taffy.

  Gabe touched the brittle sculpture with his pitchfork. There was no telling how long this body had been here, but this one was well and truly dead. He thought back to a ranch hand who’d disappeared a ­couple of months ago. This might be him, might not. There was no way of telling.

  But what Gabe was certain of was that there was something out here. Something other than the
cows and the grass and Gabe’s men with their raven familiars.

  Something even stranger.

  Petra was determined to tame her corner of Temperance with every tool at her disposal. That might not be much now, but she could build something out of chewing gum and tinfoil.

  Petra dumped a paper sack of supplies on the Airstream’s tiny kitchen table. The hardware store had yielded many treasures: aluminum tape, X-­acto knives, a piece of PVC pipe, razor blades, and rubbing alcohol. She’d picked a cardboard box out of the trash behind the post office and found a handful of CDs for free tax software that postal patrons had thrown away.

  She had everything she needed to build a crude spectroscope.

  With the X-­acto knife, she cut three holes in the box: an oval hole to hold the PVC pipe at an angle for a viewing port; a round hole on the adjacent side; and a small rectangular cut opposite the small hole. She taped two razor blades over the rectangular slice, allowing only the smallest traces of light to enter. She affixed the CD on the side with the round hole, the unmarked side facing the interior of the box. It was a crude diffraction grating, but it would do. Using the aluminum tape, she affixed the PVC pipe at an angle in the oval hole, then carefully taped the box sides and seams so that no additional light could enter.

  The finished project looked like a grade-­schooler’s sloppy rendition of a spacecraft. She drew all the blinds and peered through the pipe viewport at the fluorescent kitchen light. Light trickled through the slit and struck the back of the CD. A rainbow of colors appeared, with a ­couple of weak orange lines and strong green and blue ones. That was right for a mercury-­vapor light: lines in the spectrum between four hundred and five hundred nanometers. The calibration was roughly what she’d expect for such a crude device. The contraption worked.

  Petra found the bag containing the bloody shirt, opened it. In the darkness of the bag, the spatters still glowed. She peered through her makeshift spectroscope at the dim glow.

  Her brow wrinkled. She saw some of what she expected to see: iron, green and red lines. Iron was common in blood. And some copper. But the configuration she was seeing was unknown to her. It suggested phosphorus. And something else.

  The strongest lines were in the violet end of the spectrum, which would correspond to around 270 nanometers—­that was right where gold would be.

  Gold? Phosphorus? In blood? She frowned. Not possible. Was Gabriel suffering from heavy-­metal poisoning? She discarded that thought. It was unlikely that a blood sample would show enough of a trace element to show up on a spectrogram, let alone give off its own light.

  Gabriel. Who the hell was he? Or . . . what?

  She sighed in frustration. This equipment was too crude for her to draw a conclusion. Perhaps she could wring some better tools from the USGS, but they might be a long time coming. They’d likely only sent her surveying equipment and sample tubes for soil, to be mailed away for analysis at a more sophisticated lab. She drummed her lower lip with her fingers. Maybe she could sneak a fragment of this to them for analysis, wait for the lab’s inevitable “What the fuck?” call when they discovered she’d sent them a contaminated sample.

  It sounded like the best plan she had, for now. She closed the paper bag containing the luminescent blood sample and opened the blinds. The coyote was sitting outside the trailer, waiting patiently with his tail scuffing the dust.

  “Did you decide to knock, this time?” Petra asked him through the window.

  The coyote looked up at her, licked his chops.

  She opened the door, and the coyote sauntered in. He flopped down on the linoleum before the refrigerator, slapping his tail on the floor.

  Petra obliged by feeding him part of the sandwich she’d picked up from Bear’s Deli. The coyote delicately dismantled the sandwich with his nose and ate it one layer at a time. When he was done, he yawned and looked toward Petra’s futon.

  “I take it that you’re staying, then?”

  The coyote looked at her levelly.

  “You need a name, in that case.”

  He flicked one gold and black ear.

  “You seem to have an affinity for gold. How about Midas? He was a king who turned everything he touched to gold.”

  The coyote wrinkled his nose.

  “Pyrite? Fool’s Gold?”

  He looked away.

  “Goldie?”

  He didn’t deign to react.

  “Sigurd? Sigurd recovered gold from the dragon Fafnir in Norse mythology.”

  The coyote looked back at her.

  “Sig?”

  The coyote licked his chops. Petra took that as a sign of assent.

  “Sig, it is.”

  Sig chewed between his toes. He stretched, stood, and began to investigate the other bags that Petra had brought with her from town, the bags from the pawn shop.

  “Hey, no chewing. Bad Sig.”

  Sig ignored her, as if to make the point that he wasn’t a dog. Petra shooed him from the bags. He skulked away and threw himself on the futon. He curled up and stuck his nose under his fluffy tail, but watched her with open eyes.

  Petra took her clothes out of the bags, folded them, and tucked them away in built-­in drawers in the wall of the Airstream. As agreeable as Sig seemed, he could still chew the hell out of that nice leather coat she’d just bought.

  She opened the moldering case that contained the guns. She sneezed and left them out on the kitchen counter. That case needed to be pitched; she didn’t care how old it was. In the bottom of the gun case, Stan had packed the brooch that had fascinated her.

  Petra turned it over in her palm. There was something that chewed at her about this piece. She stared at the shadows in the photos. She didn’t have an intuitive bone in her body, but she recognized that something wasn’t right about it.

  Petra reached for the bottle of rubbing alcohol she’d picked up from the hardware store. She dampened the edge of some cotton with the alcohol and rubbed at the old tintypes. She was certain that an archivist or preservationist would kick her ass for attempting to clean an antique in this way, but she was too curious not to try.

  She gently rubbed at the image of the woman. She was pretty, blond, and delicate-­seeming. She was dressed in a high-­collared dress and had light eyes that seemed to be smiling at something off frame.

  Petra wiped at the surface with a piece of cotton dampened in water. The alcohol was already weakening the photo; she didn’t know if the solution would destroy it, but it had given her a moment’s clarity. This mourning brooch wasn’t for the woman in the picture; the hair was too dark to belong to her. Had she carried this, instead? Held it for a lost lover or husband, to have some part of him close to her?

  A lump rose in Petra’s throat, remembering Des. His casket had been black and glossy and closed. For a while, she’d tried to convince herself that he really wasn’t in there, that he’d walked away from the whole thing and was sunning himself on a beach in the Bahamas.

  The alternative was too horrible to bear. Petra didn’t believe in life after death. She didn’t believe in anything that couldn’t be sensed or quantified. And when Des had drawn his last breath, she had to believe that all trace of him had been erased from Earth.Hours after the interment, after all the cars of mourners and even the backhoe and gravediggers had left, Petra remained before Des’s tombstone. His parents had the tombstone carved, not her. It said, simply:

  Desmond Ainsley

  He walks with God now.

  1975–2014

  Petra stood before the stone, hands balled into fists that bruised the stems of the flowers in her grip. Even though she knew he wasn’t there, she told him, “I’m sorry.”

  But it didn’t matter. Because he couldn’t hear her.

  Petra stared at the locket. She wondered if the woman in the picture thought that her lost love could still hear her. Petra
’s fingers wound around her own pendant. She could understand keeping tokens of those who had disappeared—­after all, she still had this necklace. All she had left of her father, a lion pendant. She used to fantasize that he might recognize her in a crowd someday by its molten glint. She hoped that she’d recognize him too, but her memory had rendered him a bit fuzzy and indistinct over time.

  She forced her attention back to the mourning brooch before her. She daubed alcohol onto the other side, wiping at the tintype. A face came into view beneath the grime, one she thought she recognized. The aquiline nose, the set jaw, the dark hair. He was wearing a stiff-­looking hat and coat.

  It looked like Gabriel. She scrubbed at the photo with water to stop the alcohol’s action. It was a dead ringer for him. Uncanny. Maybe a great-­grandfather? A great-­great-­grandfather?

  Her rational mind spun and stalled, and her vision strayed to the bag of softly fluorescing clothes on the floor. Maybe. She felt as if there was something going on here that was beyond her ability to grasp. Some puzzle that she was on the verge of unraveling.

  “This is one screwed-­up place, Sig.” She wished the coyote could talk, answer the many questions that curdled in her brain.

  Sig snorted from the bed and closed his eyes.

  Petra heard the crunch of gravel outside and peered through the door window. Mike Hollander’s Jeep was rolling to a stop beside the Bronco. Mike hopped out, wearing not his uniform, but street clothes: a T-­shirt and jeans. He paused to appraise the Bronco, circling it.

  Petra opened the door. “You gonna kick the tires?”

  Mike grinned at her. “This dinosaur’s your new ride?”

  “Hey. That dinosaur runs.”

  Mike nodded something that looked like approval. “If it’s run for this long, it’ll run awhile more.”

  “I figured it would be good for winter.”

  Petra was conscious of a pressure at her calf. She looked down to see Sig leaning against her leg. He stared at Mike, ears pressed forward. When she opened the screen door, Sig slipped out and ran down the steps.