The Masquerading Magician

by Gigi Pandian

  “That bad, huh?” I hadn’t lived with another person in nearly a century. I wasn’t used to making myself presentable before breakfast. I ran my fingers through my tangled hair. I gave a start as a clump of hair pulled out into my hand. It was happening again. I quickly tossed the hair ball into the trash. Thankfully, Dorian didn’t appear to have noticed.

  “I would be happy to make you an espresso. Perhaps one that is très petite?”

  Dorian had ordered the espresso maker on my credit card—without asking me. Since I don’t drink coffee, the existence of the contraption caused people to think I had a “friend” who stayed overnight. Brixton’s efforts had cemented the gossip that I had a secret French boyfriend. Before he realized he needed to protect Dorian from the world, he’d tried to expose the gargoyle. Though I’d foiled Brixton’s attempts to share a video of Dorian, he’d gotten a voice recording of Dorian’s deep French-accented voice that he shared with his friends. I couldn’t completely deny the existence of a Frenchman, so I made up a story about a platonic friend who was disfigured and therefore shy of meeting anyone new. It was a messy lie, and one I hadn’t wanted to tell, but I’d had to act on the spur of the moment to protect Dorian. I especially hated that Max thought I was keeping a male friend from him, though technically that was the case.

  “Thanks, but I’ll stick with tea.” Since the plants and drugs I put into my body affect me so strongly, I’ve never been able to drink coffee. Decaf would work, but then what’s the point? The amount of caffeine in black tea, green tea, or chocolate gives me a boost without turning me into a Berserker. I got myself a glass of water and turned back to the sickly gargoyle. Even though the transformation was hurting me in ways that scared me, I knew what I had to do. “I’ll do another plant transformation today, to make your Tea of Ashes.”

  “Non.”

  “What do you mean, no? Your foot—”

  “It is killing you, Zoe.” He stepped, rather than hopped, down from the stepping stool. “You think I cannot see what is happening to you? I can no longer ask you to do this for me.”

  “You’re not asking. I’m offering.”

  The gargoyle’s gray lips quivered. “I do not wish us both to die.”

  “Neither of us is going to die,” I said firmly. I didn’t think it would help anything to mention the fact that if I died it would be a natural death—nothing compared to Dorian’s tragic fate of being alive yet trapped in unmoving stone.

  “You are a good woman, Zoe. I thank you for trying.”

  “Dorian—”

  “Un moment.” He opened the oven door and placed the loaf of bread onto a wooden cutting board. “Do you not wish to tend to your potager?”

  Though he suggested it to avoid a painful subject, he was right that I wanted to check on my backyard vegetable garden.

  “I will be in the dining room with breakfast and the newspaper,” Dorian said. “If you wish to join me and speak of other things, I would be happy to save some bread for you.”

  Denial wasn’t healthy, but who was I to judge? I’d done it myself for decades. I desperately wanted to be able to heal Dorian, but after I’d run from alchemy for so long, I didn’t know if I alone was capable of that. Was it worth it to speak with the stage magician, just in case Brixton was right?

  I left Dorian to his espresso and zucchini bread and went to check on my two gardens: the indoor window-box herb garden and the edible plants in the backyard. Though I’d started my new garden in the midst of a cold and rainy Portland winter, I knew how to coax the best out of plants. Because I wanted to get a good volume in a short amount of time to create Dorian’s Tea of Ashes, I’d planted several quick-growing herbs and vegetables, including lemon balm, parsley, leaf lettuces, spinach, sorrel, nettles, and fennel. Most of them could easily take over the garden if not harvested, but that wasn’t a problem. The thriving plants gave me a few minutes of peace, but they didn’t tell me what I should do about approaching Peter Silverman.

  After making sure the plants were tended, I made myself a green smoothie in my vintage Vitamix with greens from the garden plus a green apple for sweetness and a knob of ginger for kick. I whole-heartedly believe that both cars and blenders were perfected in the 1940s. In the modern world of disposable everything, I missed the time when things were built to last.

  I found Dorian sitting at the dining table, an empty espresso mug at his side and flaky crumbs from the freshly baked bread scattered across the entire table. Ever the gentleman, he’d saved a quarter of the small loaf on a plate for me.

  Directly in front of him were Le Monde and two local newspapers. He’d been obsessively reading every word of Le Monde for months, ever since the French paper reported gold thefts from European museums. It was an important story to follow because Dorian and I believed the “thefts” not to be thefts at all, but rather the handiwork of unscrupulous alchemists who’d died centuries ago but left false gold behind. Unlike real gold that could be created by true alchemists, the shortcuts of backward alchemy could be used to create false gold. Because intent is important in alchemical transformations, and the intentions of these backward alchemists weren’t pure, their false gold was now turning to dust. There hadn’t been any recent developments, but after so many years living itinerantly, I enjoyed having newspapers delivered to my doorstep.

  “Good riddance!” Dorian declared.

  “Did I miss something?”

  “This local newspaper reports the last of the treasure hunters have left. My woods can now go back to normal.”

  The woods near River View Cemetery were one of Dorian’s favorite places for nocturnal exploration, and it caused him grief that so many interlopers were sneaking around “his” domain.

  “Did someone find the hoard?” I asked.

  “That does not appear to be the case.” He chortled.

  “What’s so funny?” I looked over his shoulder. “THREE INJURED IN FALL NEAR RIVER VIEW CEMETERY. That headline doesn’t sound very amusing to me.”

  “Not that dreary article.” Dorian pointed a claw at another column. “The gossip columnist is much more dramatic, writing of monsoons and masterminds. Écoute.”

  LAKE LOOT TREASURE HUNTERS GIVE UP HOPE. Amateur treasure hunters from throughout the Pacific Northwest flooded to Portland in February, after monsoon-like rains led to the discovery of jewels from a 1969 train robbery. Two months later, those treasure hunters have abandoned their quest. Graphic images of injuries sustained by three men caught in a second landslide were leaked to the press. Since then, no treasure hunters have been seen on the hillside.

  A source close to the police department told this reporter that the photographs were purposefully released to scare other amateur treasure hunters away from exploring the cordoned-off area still considered a high risk for landslides.

  “What else does the columnist say of interest? Mmm … Oui … Bon.”

  I took the newspaper from his hands.

  “I was reading!” he protested.

  “You stopped reading aloud. Let me do it.”

  In 1969, mastermind Franklin Thorne robbed the wealthy Lake family’s private train car and killed guard Arnold Burke. Thorne was subsequently killed in a shoot-out with the police. Since the brazen train heist, the stolen jewels, dubbed the Lake Loot, remained elusive … until February of this year, when torrential rains caused a landslide in the hills near River View Cemetery. Days later, a sapphire necklace from the robbery was discovered near the Willamette River by two boys playing at the river’s edge. Since the boys found this small portion of the Lake Loot, treasure hunters flocked to the area.

  “Zoe,” Dorian cut in.

  I looked up.

  He held out a clawed hand. “May I?”

  “What’s the matter with how I’m reading it?”

  “Your voice lacks a certain je ne sais quoi.”

  “I’m not r
eading melodramatically enough for you?”

  Dorian blinked at me. “It is a dramatic story. It calls for a dramatic reading.”

  “Here.” I handed over the newspaper.

  Worried about another landslide, authorities blocked off the area and declared they would arrest anyone caught trespassing. But the lure of missing train-heist loot was too great. This announcement was clearly a misstep, one that simply caused the treasure hunters to return under cover of darkness, under more dangerous conditions that led to three men sustaining critical injuries. Was it the thrill of the chase that lured Oregonians to danger? If found, the distinctive jewels must be returned to their rightful owners, the Lake family, who have offered a small reward. Julian Lake, the 80-year-old survivor of the 1969 robbery, had no comment on recent developments …

  “That’s not the end. Why did you stop reading?”

  “Forty-six years,” Dorian murmured. “People speak of this as if it is a long time!” He tossed aside the newspaper and cleared the table.

  It was time for me to descend the stairs to my basement alchemy lab. Dorian may object to my continued production of his tea, but I wasn’t about to let him simply return to stone. Instead of turning on the overhead light, I lit an oil lamp. It put me in a better frame of mind to practice alchemy.

  But instead of peace, I felt confusion. The scent from the night before had vanished. It must have been my overly active imagination. Since I’m not a night person, I must have been too tired to think straight. I wished that my own body’s reaction to creating Dorian’s Tea of Ashes was nothing but my imagination. I was much sicker than I wanted to admit to either Dorian or to myself. If I didn’t find a true solution, soon I would waste away as completely as the plants I was about to turn to ash.

  Six

  Inside my makeshift alchemy lab, I tried to focus. In the past three months, I’d made fourteen glass vessels explode, sent seven streams of green liquid shooting up to the ceiling—with a stiff neck from cleaning the ceiling to prove it—and had created four tinctures with scents so noxious I couldn’t use the basement for days.

  This wasn’t how things were supposed to go.

  In the eighty years since I’d pulled away from practicing alchemy, I’d lost my touch. Big time. Processes that were once second nature to me were now faded memories. When I recalled those years working side by side with my beloved Ambrose, my partner in both life and in alchemy for four decades, I felt as if I was watching an out-of-focus film about someone else’s life. I’d continued working with herbs for food and herbal remedies, so my gardens always thrived, my dried herbs transformed boring soups into vibrant ones, and my tinctures and teas were effective remedies.

  As for the more complex transformations I’d rejected for causing more grief than joy, such as unleashing the philosopher’s stone—that’s where I was blocked. I was unable to reach the white phase of a transformation where new energy rises from the ashes.

  I reached for the locket I kept close but rarely opened. It was enough to feel the carved gold. I already knew every detail of the two faces inside, one a miniature portrait from 1701, the other a black-and-white photograph from 1904.

  It didn’t matter whether I worked in my alchemy lab with the plant transformations that used to come so easily to me, or whether I sat at my dining table surrounded by books that could shed light on the coded instructions in Not Untrue Alchemy. Nothing was coming back to me.

  In the past three months, since meeting my unique friend, I hadn’t made nearly as much progress on his strange alchemy book as I’d hoped. Perhaps my biggest failing was that I no longer knew how to find any true alchemists. I had wasted quite a bit of time that winter trying to find someone who could help, only to come up empty. I’d never finished my alchemical training, so there were missing gaps in my knowledge of the history of alchemy.

  The thing about alchemists is that they love codes. After reading every word of the book myself and having the Latin translated by an expert, I felt I knew less than I did when I started. The Latin clearly stated that to reinforce the words, the practitioner must look to the pictures.

  Retired chemistry professor Ivan Danko was helping me translate the coded messages hidden in the woodcut illustrations of the book. But despite his passion for alchemy as a precursor to modern chemistry, his assistance wasn’t the same as having a true alchemist at my side. Ivan thought of our work as a scholarly exercise to understand history. He didn’t know the true reason for my interest, nor did he know that alchemy was real. It was understandable that he devoted more time to his own historical research than to helping me with Not Untrue Alchemy.

  And because I had to use so much strength to create the “quick fix” Tea of Ashes that kept Dorian alive in the short term, I didn’t have the time and energy to fully devote myself to the larger issue of a solution that could cure the gargoyle for good. I knew there was a better solution within reach, though. I pulled Dorian’s book from the shelf. It fell open to the same page it always did. The page with the Latin that had brought Dorian to life. The book had to hold the key.

  This image of a basilisk had always disturbed me. The creature with the head of a bird and the body of a serpent was nothing unusual in coded alchemical illustrations, but this basilisk was different. His serpent’s tail was wound counterclockwise and hung down at an unnatural angle. Yet instead of writhing in pain, the creature was void of expression. Too void; he was dead. His stiff body clung to the sole turret that remained in a wasteland of castle ruins. Through the union of a bird and a dragon, the basilisk symbolized the blending of mercury and sulfur.

  I was distracted by a sweet scent. I glanced around my lab, wondering where it could be coming from. I looked up to the ceiling, where some of my exploding experiments were still embedded, looking rather like constellations. It was a fitting image, since alchemists look to the planets in the heavens for guidance about when to begin different transformations. I wondered if any flowers had germinated on the ceiling and made a mental note to take care of that. But for now, I turned back to the book.

  Birds are highly symbolic to alchemists, because an egg is the perfect vessel, hermetically sealed and representing the whole universe. Different birds symbolized different alchemical processes. For example, a self-sacrificing pelican signified distillation, and a phoenix represented the final phase that produced the philosopher’s stone. In this way, alchemists could instill their teachings in codes that could be passed down through illustrated books that only the initiated would understand. During the height of alchemy in the Middle Ages, coded messages carved into public buildings were the norm.

  Other animals were used in alchemical codes as well. Toads symbolized the First Matter (itself a riddle), and bees signaled purification and rebirth. However, the bees in this book didn’t seem to have gotten the message. In the woodcut illustrations in Non Degenera Alchemia, the skies were full of bees swarming in a counterclockwise direction, with rogue bees stinging the eyes of the people and animals on the ground. I shivered.

  I turned the page to get away from the disturbing basilisk illustration, only to come to an even more disturbing one. This page showed the Black Dragon, which symbolized death and decay, and was a code for antimony. Antimony was Isaac Newton’s favorite substance, because of its starlike crystal shape, which he thought could explain light and the universe. This Black Dragon was picking his way through another set of ruins. Death surrounded him, yet he appeared to be alive. Fierce flames escaped the dragon’s mouth. I slammed the book shut, wondering if I was subconsciously avoiding working with it because of its psychological effect on me.

  Something had to change. I couldn’t keep this up much longer.

  The book had shaken my ability to focus, so it would be pointless to either work in the lab or try to translate the obscure symbols in the book’s woodcut illustrations. A knot formed in my stomach as the images from Dorian’s book swirled throug
h my mind. I had to get out of the house. Away from the book.

  I nearly ran from the house as I left to take a walk to clear my head. I walked through Lone Fir Cemetery, a peaceful park not far from my house. I couldn’t stop thinking about the strange scent from my bookshelf. I knew I must have imagined it. Books might become moldy and begin to smell stale, but not sweet. And even if my plant transformations had resulted in plant seedlings sprouting in the basement, they wouldn’t give off the aroma I’d smelled. Clove-scented honey. That’s what the sweet scent had been! The scents of spring that surrounded me in the cemetery made it impossible to ignore the memory.

  I hurried home and went straight to the bookshelf in the locked basement. I again pulled Not Untrue Alchemy from the shelf. I brought the pages to my nose and breathed deeply. I inhaled the musty, woody aroma that I found in most centuries-old books. Underneath the obvious was the distinct scent of honey. This was where the scent was coming from. Dorian’s book.

  I’ve worked with a lot of old books, but I’d never encountered anything like this morphing sweet scent. I wondered if Ivan had.

  I hadn’t seen Ivan in several weeks. He’d come down with pneumonia at the tail end of winter, which hit him hard because he suffered from a degenerative illness. He didn’t like to talk about the specifics, so I didn’t know what was wrong with him. After getting back on his feet, he’d been intent on making up for lost time in his own research. I’d brought him a healing garlic tincture when he was sick, but I had respected his wishes and left him in peace to catch up on his own research now that he was well. But this wasn’t the time to be polite. If Dorian’s book was truly changing, this was a breakthrough I couldn’t ignore.

  I reached for my phone.

  “Dobrý den,” Ivan’s voice said on the other end of the line, and when I identified myself he switched to English. “I’m so glad you called, Zoe,” he said in his Czech accent. “I wanted to thank you for the tincture you brought me when I was sick.”