by Gigi Pandian
“I hope it helped.”
“Do you want to know something about being Czech?” he asked. “People often think my accent sounds Transylvanian. They encourage me to dress up as Dracula for Halloween. Especially a young girl who lives next door to me. Her name is Sara. She wears a scarf around her neck each day. I thought it was a fashion statement for a seven-year-old finding herself, but I learned from her mother it was because she was protecting herself from Dracula. One night, when her parents did not realize what she was doing, she watched an old black-and-white Dracula movie, and it made her think she lived next door to a vampire.”
With Ivan’s graying hair and scruffy beard, I couldn’t imagine him as the romantic Hollywood version of Dracula. But there was a stoic strength to Ivan. He didn’t dwell on his health problems, instead undertaking an ambitious research project he wanted to finish before he died. His light blue eyes always shone with intelligence and determination. No, I couldn’t see him as Dracula. But I could see him as Vlad the Impaler.
“Thanks to your garlic tincture,” he continued, “Sara says there’s no way I could be Dracula.”
I laughed. “I hope it helped your infection too.”
“That it did. Děkuju. I’m back to work on my book. Sara has christened herself my research assistant, fetching me the books in my home library I can no longer climb to retrieve.”
“About your library,” I said, “I have a question for you.” I paused and chose my words carefully. “Have you ever encountered an old alchemy book that smelled sweet, compared to the more typical moldy smell?”
He chuckled. “Once, at the Klementinum, a patron was banned for sprinkling a rosewater perfume on a foul-smelling book.”
“What about the scent of honey?”
“Honey?” Ivan hesitated, and when he resumed, there was a change in his voice that caused my skin to prickle. “It’s curious that you mention honey. I think I may have something that would interest you.”
I gripped the phone. “You have a book like that?”
“I remember it because of the unnerving nature of the woodcut illustration.” He paused, and I could picture him shuddering. “I hadn’t thought of it until you mentioned honey, but now I see it clearly in my mind.” As he spoke, the tone of his voice changed from casual to agitated. “Perhaps it’s best to leave it alone.”
“Why?” I asked, the tenor of my own voice reacting to his worry.
“It’s an image I don’t know that I will ever forget, Zoe,” Ivan said hesitantly. “I don’t know if you want to see this.”
Seven
I assured Ivan that I could handle looking at a disturbing image. He told me he was at Blue Sky Teas and had his research with him on his laptop, so I told him I’d be right there.
The teashop was on Hawthorne, walking distance from my house. My mind always calmed down several notches as I walked through the door beneath the sign that read “There is no trouble so great or grave that cannot be diminished by a nice cup of tea—Bernard-Paul Heroux.” Inside, a weeping fig tree stretched up to the high ceiling, casting peaceful shadows across the redwood tree-ring tabletops.
A woman in her late twenties rushed out from behind the counter so quickly her blond braids whipped around her head.
“Zoe!” Brixton’s mom stood on the balls of her bare feet and threw her arms around me. “You really outdid yourself with today’s treats. Can I double my order for weekend mornings? I’m nearly out of these oatmeal cakes. Who knew so many people would think vegan food was so tasty?”
“Definitely,” I said, looking around at the long line of patrons. Dorian would be thrilled.
Blue Sky Teas was started by our mutual friend Blue, who’d been cleared of a murder charge but was currently serving a short jail sentence for a previous crime. During Blue’s absence, Brixton’s young mom, Heather, was keeping Blue Sky Teas open for limited hours, which helped both women. Heather was trying to become a professional painter. She had the talent to pull it off, but she hadn’t made much money at it yet. I was surprised Brixton wasn’t helping her today. It was midmorning on a Saturday, so maybe he was still asleep. When I was young, there was no way a fourteen-year-old kid would be allowed to sleep in. Then again, when I was young, fourteen-year-old’s weren’t thought of as kids.
Brixton and Heather used to live only a few blocks away, but they were now living temporarily at Blue’s cottage in a field on the outskirts of Portland. At the cottage, Heather had more space for her painting. The recent floods that had swept through Portland inspired her to create a new series of paintings featuring water, and the cottage was strewn with painted canvasses in various stages of completion. Brixton had a stepdad, too, who he adored, but I hadn’t met the man. Abel was out of town for work most of the time. The nature of his work hadn’t been volunteered, so I hadn’t enquired.
Heather retreated behind the counter, and I joined Ivan at a table near the window. A quart-size mason jar filled with yellow daffodils and white trillium declared that spring had begun. The vase of wildflowers dominated the table, dwarfing the emaciated man sitting there.
Ivan Danko hadn’t been this small a man when I’d met him earlier that winter. Although his ongoing illness seemed stable, his recent bout of pneumonia had taken its toll. His blue eyes had a cast of gray, and his short beard was ragged. He’d barely touched his breakfast.
“I thought I had an image of the book on my laptop,” Ivan said after we exchanged pleasantries, “but I was mistaken. I’m sorry to have sent you on a fool’s errand.”
My heart sank. Each time I thought I was coming close to a breakthrough with Dorian’s book, something got in my way. It was as if the universe was teasing me. “Do you remember anything about it?”
“I don’t know exactly how to explain it,” Ivan said. “It would be easiest to show you.”
I stared at him. “Wait, I thought you didn’t have it.”
“Not here. In my home library. I’m nearly done with my tea. Do you want to accompany me back to my house?”
“I’ll get my tea to go.”
Ivan lived in a small house on the north side of Hawthorne Boulevard. We walked to his home, breathing in the sweet scents of plum and cherry trees, newly blossoming as spring took hold after an especially brutal winter. I made an effort not to speed up our leisurely pace to the brisk walking I preferred, since I knew Ivan hadn’t been well.
One look at his house made it clear that the retired professor of chemistry was a scholar. Ivan had transformed the largest room of his house into an alchemy library. He was writing a book about the unsung heroes of science—scientists who experimented with alchemy as part of their work. Isaac Newton was one of the more famous scientists who conducted alchemical experiments. Knowing how men of science viewed alchemy, Newton had hidden his work, yet he felt it was important enough to continue in secret.
Finishing his academic book on unsung scientists who worked on alchemy was Ivan’s goal before he died. I was again struck by the collection he’d amassed.
“It’s here somewhere,” he said, rooting around in a stack of papers on a side table. “Now if only I could remember where I put it … ”
While he searched, I looked around the room. The oak bookshelves had been custom-made to fit into the dimensions of the room, including a low bookshelf that ran underneath the window that dominated one wall. The window looked out onto evergreen trees that towered over the house, making this the perfect room for contemplative research. On the window sill were several photos, including a recent one of him and Max smiling as they held giant beer steins. The two men were friends who’d met as regulars at Blue Sky Teas.
A photo album lay open on Ivan’s desk. An enlarged photograph showed Ivan as a young man. I stepped closer to his desk to take a better look at the photograph. Ivan was pictured with two other men in Staromestske Namesti, the historic Old Town Square in Prague, in fr
ont of the famous astrological clock. He wore a beard even then, and his hair was just as unkempt. The buttons of his white dress shirt were mismatched. I smiled, amused to see he’d always been an absentminded professor.
Ivan reached across me and closed the album.
“I’ve never asked you why you left Prague,” I said. “Wouldn’t it have been easier to write this book there, in the heart of alchemical history?”
He looked to the photo album, a mixture of joy and sadness on his face. “Too many painful memories. Someone so young will not fully understand—”
“I thought you said I was an old soul.”
Ivan gave me a sad smile. “Before I came to be at peace with my illness, I behaved quite foolishly. I tell people my condition made it necessary for me to take early retirement. This is true—up to a point. Had I acted better, the university would have kept me on as a professor emeritus, with my office and research privileges.” He closed his eyes and was lost in thought for a few moments. “But that choice was taken away from me, by my own actions. I couldn’t accept that I was losing control of my body. I’d like to blame it on the illness affecting my mind, but that would be a lie; my mind is as sharp as it ever was.”
“Which is its own curse,” I murmured. “You’re fully aware that your body is failing and everything that means.”
Ivan’s eyes lit up. “You do understand.”
I thought of Dorian but didn’t speak. I took Ivan’s hand, which was far too frail for someone in his mid-fifties, and squeezed it gently.
“I was angry,” Ivan said. “I lashed out at everyone around me and went down a self-destructive path. I went back-and-forth between looking for false cures and drowning myself with alcohol. The university asked me to take an early retirement, to avoid a scandal. It was too painful to stay in Prague, where I spent so many happy years in my youth. And I did not wish the people who knew me before to see this is what I became. In this modern age, research is possible anywhere.”
“It’s not the same.”
“I had the choice of staying in Prague but being too angry to do my research, or going somewhere else where I could focus completely on my book before I die.” He cleared his throat and looked away. I gave him space, but he didn’t need long. “Ah! Here it is.”
I took a piece of paper from his hands. Not only was it a print-out of a scanned copy, but it was the image of a secondary source, not an original alchemy book. The top half of the page contained explanatory text in German, and the lower half showed a poor-
quality photograph of an illustration in an alchemy book. The yellowed page looked like a woodcut, as was common for alchemical reproductions. Though the image was blurred, I made out the central image of a cherubic angel trapped in a prison of flames, with bees circling above in a counterclockwise circle.
Backward alchemy.
I felt myself shaking with fear and excitement as I took in all the details. On the edge of the image, outside the flames, two men were dressed as jesters. Though the book had been damaged, the image was clear enough to reveal that the bees were stinging the men’s eyes.
The bees in Dorian’s alchemy book were used in a similarly unsettling way. But here in this image, there was something more. I realized why Ivan had said the image was so disturbing. The hair on my arms stood up as my gaze fell to the eyes of the angel. The absolute horror in her eyes cut through my core, bridging the gap between the printed page and the ground beneath my feet.
“I told you it was alarming,” Ivan said. “It is much worse than any horror movie, no?”
It had always amazed me how much life artists could breathe into an image, even when all they had was a knife and a piece of wood. “Why did my question make you think of this illustration?”
“Honey,” Ivan said. “The scent of honey. This is a book about alchemy, not an original alchemy book itself. The author of this scholarly book made a notation that when working with this alchemy book, he detected the scent of honey. Apparently, honey was used as a preservative. Counterintuitive, but alchemists have always been known for being ahead of their time.”
“Where did this book come from?” I asked. Ivan and the author’s theory of honey as a preservative didn’t ring true, but something was going on.
“The academic text is in a German university archive,” Ivan said, “but unfortunately the original source is unknown. The woodcut illustration was found as three single sheets of paper in a French bookshop.”
I nodded. “From the blackened edges, it’s clear the book was badly damaged.”
“Ah!” Ivan said. “That’s what I thought myself at first. But take a closer look. This photograph is of the three pages together.”
I squinted. “They’re overlaid,” I whispered.
“Alchemists and their codes,” Ivan said. “Here, the author notes that the flames were from a subsequent page, yet when the pages are placed together, the flames trace the edges of the angel.”
The way the images were overlaid created a new meaning. Was it on purpose? Or by accident? Looking more closely at the photographic image on the page, it looked as if the paper had been scorched at the edges. And were those granules of soot? Without the original, there was no way to tell.
“Can you read me the rest of the text?” I asked. I’m good at picking up languages, but I never learned German. To blend in completely—to hide in plain sight—I’ve found it best to become fluent in a handful of languages, rather than gaining a superficial understanding of many more. Along with a deep understanding of a few languages, I’m good at picking up the local vernacular of a certain time and place. Unlike some alchemists I’ve known who would cling to outdated speech patterns, I’ve adapted.
Ivan explained that the rest of the text on the page theorized that the image was a warning about the dangers of alchemy. I knew better. This image told of backward alchemy’s death rotation. Ivan knew of my “scholarly” interest in it, but he hadn’t connected this illustration with backward alchemy. I shouldn’t have been surprised; it was an obscure subject, even for alchemists and alchemy scholars. His oversight drove home the fact that Ivan’s help wasn’t enough. I needed to find someone familiar with backward alchemy. I needed to find a true alchemist. The magician Prometheus?
“The passage ends,” Ivan said, “by noting that half of the angel’s body is stone.”
I gave a start, and my eyes grew wide as I looked to the lower half of the angel’s body. This was one thing the scholar was right about. With the blurry quality of the photograph I hadn’t noticed before, but now that I looked for it, it was obvious. The angel’s legs fused into a stone boulder, the two becoming one. She was trapped by her own body.
It was exactly what was happening to Dorian.
My phone buzzed, startling me out of the disturbing implications of this new information. A text message from Brixton popped up on my phone, saying there was an emergency and I had to get back right away.
What emergency? I texted back.
He didn’t reply. I called him. He hated talking on the phone, so I didn’t expect him to answer. But he did.
“Zoe! He’s here!”
“Who’s where?”
“Get over to your house.”
“Who—”
“It’s the magician! I knew I was right. He’s an alchemist—and he’s right here—”
“He came to see me?” How would he know where I lived? And more importantly, why would he seek me out?
“No. He’s a criminal, Zoe. He’s—”
My blood went cold. “Brix, if he’s breaking into the house”—the line went dead—“call the police,” I said to dead air.
I tried to calm my breathing. One day that boy was going to cry wolf one too many times … But I’d never forgive myself if this was something real. I’d given Brixton a key to my house when he’d stayed with me for a few days. He rarely used it
after that, but what if he was at the house and the magician-alchemist was trying to get inside? All I knew was that Peter Silverman was a criminal of some kind. And a kid wasn’t going to stop him.
Eight
notre dame de paris, 1845
Someone must have broken into the room and switched documents. Surely that was the only explanation for the content of the papers strewn across the architect’s desk.
Eugène Viollet-le-Duc frowned. He looked from old architectural drawings of Notre Dame de Paris to sketches of the cathedral over the centuries. These records couldn’t be right, could they? Yet Viollet-le-Duc could not fathom the purpose of such a deception.
The world-renowned architect and artist had been hired along with Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Lassus to restore the grand cathedral. To Viollet-le-Duc, “restore” was a broad term. He had plans to bring the outdated building into the nineteenth century. He dreamed of simultaneously restoring the previous glory of the cathedral and adding modern flourishes to show the new generation how glorious the Paris institution truly was.
To ensure his own additions would be perfectly integrated, the architect gathered official historical records and sought out artists’ renditions of the cathedral over the centuries.
Now that he had both sets of records before him, something wasn’t right.
The cathedral’s construction had begun in 1163, and modifications had continued for centuries. The prolonged construction was due to both expanding the site’s glory to God and taking advantage of new advances in architecture. Viollet-le-Duc planned to use modern architectural styles and techniques, as his predecessors had done with their own generations’ discoveries. There was also more to be done than restoration and expansion. There was also rebuilding sections that had been destroyed. During the French Revolution of the previous century, which had ended shortly before his birth, the revolutionaries had destroyed anything they felt symbolized nobility. Religious symbols of the Kings of Judah on the façade of Notre Dame had been mistaken for Kings of France, and therefore defaced.