Dark Alchemy

by Laura Bickle

  She stared at the pile of blackened wood: ceiling joists, wall framing, shattered sheets of floor. Even if Gabe had been able to survive fire—­and based on what she’d seen, she thought that there was a fair chance that he could—­there was no way that he could survive the weight of that much wood crushing him. Her heart sagged.

  On the way, she’d picked a bouquet of red fireweed. She laid it down on the crumbling chimney. She felt as if she should say something.

  “I wish . . .” More words wouldn’t come. She couldn’t compress what she felt into a phrase. I wish that you hadn’t come back for me. I wish I had known you better. I wish I hadn’t fucked it up, because I was beginning to feel something again, and it scared the hell out of me.

  Her attention was arrested by something writhing in the shadows behind the ruin of the chimney. She climbed to her feet and squinted at the shadow. Sig scuttled toward it.

  “Sig, leave it alone.”

  A wing, moving. Petra plunged her hands into the ash to free the raven. She blew ash from its face. It blinked up at her through a filmy eye, its beak parted in stress. She carefully ran her fingers over its feathers, pausing over singe marks on its body. Its left wing had been burned and crumpled. Its tail was a charred nub. But it lived.

  Petra sat back on her heels, pressing the bird to her chest. She wondered if this was one of Gabe’s, keeping vigil. Maybe, in its own way, it haunted this place. Maybe it was a hand or a foot separated from his destroyed body, searching for the remains. Hope flared in her as she gazed down at the bird.

  “Are you part of him?” she asked.

  The bird didn’t answer.

  She wrapped the bird carefully in her denim shirt. It took three tries to get out of the sleeves without causing the wounds under her bandages to howl. The bird’s talons chewed into her tank top, leaving smears of soot on it like charcoal in a sketchbook. His head jerked to and fro, searching for the sky beyond her shoulders and the confines of his denim straitjacket.

  Whistling for Sig, Petra returned to the Bronco. Sig was suddenly shy. The coyote clambered solemnly into the backseat, leaving shotgun for Petra’s burden.

  The bird remained silent as Petra cranked the engine. She had a momentary fear that the raven would go batshit and flutter around the car in a panicked escape attempt, but it simply lay where she’d put it, watching her with a marble-­like eye. As the Bronco crunched down the gravel road, late afternoon sun poured through the bug-­smeared windshield. She tried to convince herself that there was some intelligence glimmering in the raven’s eye, that she had something more than a half-­roasted and exhausted bird in her truck.

  “I know it’s stupid,” she told Sig. “I know that it’s stupid to think that part of Gabe is still alive . . . that he could be restored.”

  Sig glanced back they way they’d come and whined.

  “But I have to take the chance. I have to. And if the Hanged Men never came back for him, never brought his body to the Lunaria . . . then at least this part of him can be home.”

  The coyote huffed and paced the pleather seats.

  Taking the back road to the Rutherford ranch, she exited to the west through a gap in the barbed wire fence and plunged the truck into the sea of golden grass. The axles creaked and groaned at the off-­road terrain. At this hour, the cattle grazed peacefully under blue sky. All seemed ordinary and unenchanted. There was no sign of the Hanged Men.

  The Lunaria stood, magnificent at sunset. Gold streamed through the reach of its branches, illuminating bits of grass and dust motes floating in the air, like fireflies. No breeze or birds rustled the branches, like they had in her dreams. The tree was still. But when she looked closer, she saw that part of the tree had begun to wither, as if early autumn had bruised it. Several thick branches were studded with rusty leaves that had once been green.

  Petra shut off the engine. She hopped out and waded through the grass. It took her three passes around the tree before she found the ring of the trapdoor. Lifting it open, she peered into the blackness beyond.

  Sig whined.

  She stared down at her bandaged arms. There might be a possibility that she could get down there unaided, but climbing back out without any help would be impossible.

  Returning to the truck, she popped the back tailgate and rummaged about. She came up with jumper cables and returned to the hatch. Tying one end of the jumper cables around the hinge, she threw the other end into the dark.

  Petra gathered the singed bird from the truck and crossed back to the hole. Sig was making awful faces, pacing before the entrance to the catacombs.

  “You can’t go,” she said. “I can’t lift you back out.”

  He parked himself on his rump, resolved to watch her as she awkwardly grasped the bright yellow cable with one hand, balancing the bird in the crook of her other elbow. Her right foot swung around, probing until she found the cable. Clasping the cable between her knees, she took a deep breath and lowered herself.

  The cable turned and twisted as she descended. She slid down, forgetting the clamps at the other end. A clamp ripped into her shin, and she hissed, nearly letting go. The cable was short, and she kicked the darkness with her left foot, feeling nothing below her.

  “Damn it.”

  Gripping the bird tightly with her left arm, she let go with her right.

  She landed on her feet after a short drop, but lost her balance and fell forward onto one knee. She caught herself with her free arm, fingers flexing in the dirt. The bird squirmed at her chest, but she could see nothing until her vision adjusted.

  For a moment, Petra dared to believe in the tree’s magic. She hoped that Gabe had somehow survived, that the Hanged Men had dug him up under the cover of night and brought him here to regenerate. More than anything, she wanted to find him sleeping in the loving grasp of the tree’s roots. She hoped that this bird was one of his, that she could return it and awaken him with this offering.

  Sucking in her breath, she took a step forward.

  Out of the glare of the light above, she could make out a shimmer of gold before her. The roots of the Lunaria dangled from the ceiling like icicles, gleaming in the shifting shadows. It was daytime, so no phalanx of silent men dangled here. But something was nestled in the brightest part of the roots, an orb that shone like a harvest moon.

  She touched it, and it dimmed. The otherworldly shine faded to something she recognized—­the Venificus Locus. The compass was set in a nest of roots that curled around its edges. It still held a drop of her blood, spinning crazily inside it like a wasp in a mason jar, scraping against the gold with an insectile whine.

  Unthinking, she reached for it. Some part of her knew that this was hers, that no matter if the Hanged Men had retrieved it in Stroud’s Garden, it belonged to her.

  It came loose as easily as plucking an apple, and she stumbled backward with the compass in one fist and the bird in her other arm. The compass was thick and sticky with a luminescent fluid that trickled over her wrist, as if she’d opened some great and terrible wound in the tree.

  The bird started screaming.

  Clutching the struggling bird close to her chest, she looked up, up into the seething shadow. The roots were moving, shifting. Shit. She’d disturbed something badly in here, and the tree was awake.

  Mighty roots turned toward her, and she saw a face hovering above hers, just above the cavity where the compass had lain.

  “Oh, my God,” she breathed.

  It was Gabe’s head—­his face had gone slack in a death’s mask of pale horror, his hair wound in the tendrils of roots. His eyes were closed, and his mouth stretched open. He was frozen in a scream—­screaming with the raven’s voice.

  “Oh, no . . .”

  The shifting light illuminated him—­what was left of him. His chest cavity was open and shining, roots winding through the pale fingers of ribs, searchi
ng for the compass she’d just removed. His hands hung above him, an impossible distance away from his shoulders—­one pale and unmarked, the other like a clutch of finger bones sewed together with a glowing spiderweb. She couldn’t see any feet, or any of the rest of his body in the seething mass of roots and broken bones.

  Perhaps only this had survived, this incomplete horror. She remembered what Jeff had been, how the magic of the tree had been unable to re-­form him. Any thoughts she had about Gabe being older and stronger and more magical disintegrated.

  Tears ran down her cheeks. “Oh, Gabe . . .” She stuffed the compass in her back pocket and reached out to touch his face with her fingertips. He flinched away. One eye opened, and it was black as obsidian. Inhuman.

  He drew breath to scream again, and out of his mouth came the raven’s shriek. Luminescing blood dribbled down his lip.

  She reached for her belt to fumble with a gun. Her sweat-­slick hands shook so hard that it took two tries to pull the hammer back. She aimed the gun at a spot just between his eyebrows. If she had any bit of mercy or ethics about her, she should shoot him in the head until the raven stopped screaming. That would be the humane thing to do, wouldn’t it? That had been what he’d done for Jeff.

  But a bullet wouldn’t kill him. Only wood could end his pain. “Damn it, damn it . . .” Her vision blurred to gold shadows and charred feathers. She couldn’t leave him. Not like this, in pieces. But she couldn’t end him either, this howling shadow that remained.

  The bird in her arms continued fight against its denim straitjacket.

  She stepped back, and the raven clawed loose of the prison of her arms. It flung itself at Gabe, clambering up the ruin of his chest with its talons, until he found the hole in his chest where the compass had been set. In a flutter of soot and feathers, it dove into that hole.

  And then there was silence.

  Gabe’s face went slack, and his eyes shut. The sudden quiet . . . it terrified her more than the screaming.

  She put the gun away and edged close to him, reached for his neck. She felt nothing. Not that she’d expected to feel the beat of a pulse, but she expected to feel that odd staticky hum of his. But the silence was unbroken.

  With shaking fingers, she dug the sticky Locus out of her pocket. The Locus was unmoving.

  No more magic.

  She stared at Gabe, in pieces, for a long time. Only when the sunshine drained out of the hatch in the ceiling did she turn to leave. She jumped up to reach the cable, then hauled herself, fist over fist, up into the twilight middle world. Her arms ached, and stitches in her skin beneath the bandages split, oozing rusty red blood over her elbows and between her fingers.

  She crouched at the edge of the hatch, staring down into the darkness. Sig sat beside her, solemn and steady as she dragged the door shut. The illusion of a perfect field was now complete.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. She kissed her hand and pressed it to the earth.

  She had the sense that Gabe hadn’t wanted to live forever, that he had simply been trapped in a terrible machine he’d been unable to escape. There had been something human there.

  Something she’d begun to love.

  She pressed her hands to her face and sobbed.

  Petra smoothed the dress she’d borrowed from Maria as she walked through the automatic doors of the Phoenix Village Nursing Home. The place smelled of disinfectant and mashed potatoes, that unmistakable odor of civilized death.

  She walked through a small, shabby lobby with plaid couches and a plastic flower arrangement that an elderly lady was trying to take apart. A young woman in a smock was trying to keep the old woman’s hands occupied, carefully taking the flowers from her fingers and pushing a soft rag doll into them. Petra’s borrowed heels clacked on the green checkerboard tile, and she wobbled up to the front desk.

  “Hello. I’m here to see Joseph Dee,” Petra said.

  The middle-­aged woman in a nurse’s uniform behind the front desk frowned at her clipboard. “I’m sorry, ma’am, but we don’t have a—­”

  Petra shook her head. “I’m sorry. I think he’s listed in your system as John Doe Number Three.”

  The nurse nodded. “We have plenty of John Does. Sign here.” She passed a sign-­in sheet across the desk, and Petra scribbled her name.

  “He’s in room 113, hon.”

  Petra swallowed and nodded. She sucked in a deep breath and walked past the desk down the hallway. Her fingers gnawed at the itchy bandages under her calico sleeves. She was excited to find her father, but also afraid. She wondered if he would look like he did in her hallucinations. On the phone, the facility administrator had said that John Doe Number Three was the right age and general physical description to be her father. But he hadn’t spoken for years. His bills were paid every month, on time, but the administrator couldn’t say by who—­the payer’s identity was shielded by a legal trust.

  She paused before an open door with the number “113” stenciled on it. Steeling herself for disappointment, she knocked on the doorframe.

  “Hello?” Her voice sounded very small, as if it belonged to a little girl.

  A room with two beds in it had a television running at low volume. A man in a wheelchair sat facing the window, and Petra could only see the back of his head. The view was just of the parking lot, but she supposed that it was more exciting than the game show on the fizzling black and white television.

  Petra forced herself to put one foot in front of the other until she was beside the wheelchair. She squatted and looked up at the man’s face.

  The man in the chair stared vacantly outside. His face was unfamiliar, saggy and lined. His hair had been shaved with clippers, probably to make him easy to wash. His fingers were gnarled and tangled in his lap, and he was dressed in a faded hospital gown with a blanket covering his lap. He seemed utterly foreign.

  But this man had her father’s eyes, opaque and distant. She recognized that look, the look that he had when thinking of distant places. She recognized the amber color from her dream.

  “Dad?” she whispered.

  The eyes didn’t flicker, didn’t move from their intense focus on a trash can just outside the window.

  Petra reached out to touch his hand. “Dad? It’s me. Petra.”

  He didn’t respond.

  Her eyes filled with tears. Perhaps Stroud had told her the truth; that he’d lost himself to Alzheimer’s a long time ago. She choked back a sob.

  The old man’s eyes turned to her. But they weren’t looking at her. They stared at the pendant around her throat. Petra followed his gaze, unfastened the necklace. She pressed the pendant into his hand. “Dad, do you remember this?”

  Her father stared at the glittering lion devouring the sun in his palm. His thumb slowly traced the arch of the lion’s back. Then he reached out with his other hand and touched Petra’s freckled cheek.

  She smiled and blinked back tears. Some small part of him was in there. A flicker, some bit of that spirit that she’d encountered in the otherworld. “Yeah, Dad. It’s me.”

  It wasn’t much, but it was a new start. Maybe she could grab onto it with both fists and pull it back through sheer force of will.

  “Sig. Stop that.”

  Petra sidestepped a stream of urine issuing forth from the coyote onto a telephone pole. She was determined to remove the flyers she’d put up all over town, and Sig had taken this as an invitation to mark the entire town of Temperance as his territory, from the post office to the hardware store and every pole and parked car in between.

  Sig ignored her and kept watering the dead tree.

  “Jesus. You must have a bladder the size of a basketball.”

  Sig snorted. He stopped pissing long enough to stand back and sniff at his handiwork.

  Petra snatched her flyer from the telephone pole, tucking it under her arm with a stack of o
thers destined for the recycling bin. She knew where her father was—­at least, she knew what space his physical body was occupying. She’d worry about where his mind was next, but she was pretty sure that her homemade signage wasn’t gonna help with that.

  A familiar pickup truck rumbled past her, then parked at the hardware store just up the street. The Hanged Men piled out of the back as a group, heading inside without discussion. She watched them, wondering. Who was directing them, now that Gabe was gone? Were they just doing what they always did on the farm, or had Sal tightened the reins on them?

  The driver’s side door of the truck opened, and Petra’s heart fell into her stomach.

  It was Gabe. He swung out on two legs, his body seeming as whole and normal as she remembered. Both hands were attached to flannel-­covered arms, and no wounded ravens nested in his chest. He looked down the street, gazed past her, and reached inside the truck for a white hat on the dashboard.

  “Gabe!”

  She dropped her stack of flyers in the middle of Sig’s puddle and ran down the street to him.

  She reached out to grasp his arms. “Gabe, you’re alive!”

  He looked at her blankly. When he did so, his head twitched a bit, like a bird’s.

  “Gabe. It’s me. Petra.” His skin felt cold and unyielding under the flannel.

  There was no recognition on his face. None. His eyes seemed to go through her, barely registering her presence.

  She released him, stepping back. “Don’t you know me?”

  He said nothing, just looked at her with that infuriatingly empty gaze. He didn’t blink. She’d seen that mechanical look before, in the rest of the Hanged Men. The ones that he’d called automatons.