The Masquerading Magician

by Gigi Pandian

  I brought Non Degenera Alchemia to the best viewing table in the lab, a slanted wooden desk once used by monks painting illuminated manuscripts. The desk was one of the high-end items for sale on my website, but until it sold, it was a great book stand. Standing in front of the old pages that had weathered the years so well, I willed my mind to understand the morbid woodcut illustrations. My vision blurred as I stared at the counterclockwise circle of bees. Through my unfocused eyes, the black ink of the dead animals underneath blended into a smoky haze.

  My focus snapped to attention.

  Why did the image trigger a disturbing memory as soon as my vision blurred? I stared at the bees, as if the intensity of my gaze could capture the animals through sheer will. The memory slipped from my grasp.

  I needed to get away from the book for just a moment. I stepped back and sat down in front of the table containing the glass vessels and the mortar and pestle I’d used to make Dorian’s Tea of Ashes. Though I’d cleaned it well, I could still smell the ashes. Backward alchemy called for using fire too early in the transformation, burning too hot.

  Fire and ash.

  My eyelids felt heavy.

  The next thing I knew, a faint glow of light was coming through the narrow frosted glass window high on one of the basement walls. It must have been shortly after sunrise. While I’d accidentally slept, the candles had extinguished themselves and the dim sunlight was the only light in the room.

  A lurch in my stomach reminded me that Dorian was gone, and a kink in my neck told me I’d slept all night with my head resting on a table. Damn. I’d tried so hard to stay awake! But it’s not my nature to be awake in darkness. Ever since I was a small child, the perceptiveness that made me understand plants affected my body the same way. When plants slept, my eyelids drooped. I was called a “simpler” at the time. The people in Salem Village thought of it as magic. But being observant of the natural world isn’t magic. If I’d been born in the late twentieth century and was the age I looked, I would probably have been a botanist. As it was, I became a plant alchemist.

  The planetary cycles and light and darkness don’t affect all alchemists equally. Living with Ambrose in early-twentieth-century Paris, I begged him to go out to the bal-musettes without me, since I needed to sleep and renew my energy. There was no need for my weakness to prevent him from enjoying himself. He wouldn’t hear of it. He argued I was the best herbalist around and could make myself an energizing tonic so I could go out dancing with him all night. It usually got me through to midnight.

  I unlatched my locket chain and looked at the images inside—a black-and-white photograph of Ambrose and a miniature portrait of my brother. I had a larger photograph of Ambrose somewhere. I’d kept it hidden from sight for so long because it was too painful to have a daily reminder of my loss. But the more I thought about it, that was backward. Suddenly, I desperately wanted to find that larger photograph.

  Aside from my journal of alchemical notes, I’ve never kept a proper diary. But my notebooks serve much the same purpose, holding pressings of flowers, ticket stubs, sketches, and photographs. The photograph wasn’t in my notebook that encompassed 1935, the year of Ambrose’s death. I ransacked the attic in search of the photograph. It wouldn’t be in an articulated bird skeleton, an apothecary jar, or any glass vessel. It must have been inside one of my notebooks. Half an hour later, I found it tucked inside a palm-sized sketchbook from the 1950s, the book I’d carried with me for the first few years I traveled around the country in my brand-new Airstream trailer that was now six decades old.

  Ambrose’s kind eyes smiled up at me. For many years after his death, his image had caused me pain. But looking at him now, I felt hope. Ambrose would have told me he had faith in me.

  I thought back on what I’d been working on before falling asleep. My eyes had glazed over while staring at the pages of Dorian’s book. No, that wasn’t quite right. They hadn’t glazed over. My tired eyes had made the illustrations blur together. Much like the blurry image of the German book Ivan had showed me. I’d gotten sidetracked by too many other things to research that academic book. I hadn’t prioritized it because the scholar who wrote it clearly didn’t have an understanding of the backward alchemy illustration he’d included.

  But what about the backward alchemy image itself … an angel turning to stone? Or was it a stone angel that had been brought to life? Death and resurrection. Mercury and sulfur. Fire and ash.

  I needed to talk to Ivan. It was too early to talk to him now, but after watering my garden and fixing myself two cups of tea, I called him.

  I brought Dorian’s book to his house, along with the printout from the art of alchemy book he’d given me with the disturbing image of the stone angel, dead jesters, and bees.

  “This substance,” I said, pointing to the sooty markings on the edge of the page. “Do you have any thoughts on what it might be?”

  “No,” Ivan said with a shake of his head, “but I take good notes about where I find all of my reference materials.” With unsteady hands, he searched through an electronic document on his computer.

  A few minutes later, he found the location of the German book that had been written by a nineteenth-century scholar of alchemy. Ivan had found it digitally archived by a Czech university. Not much was known about it, but the cataloguing librarian’s notes indicated that the book had been damaged by a fire, and some soot remained on the pages.

  Fire and ash.

  “You have a working fireplace, don’t you?” I said to Ivan.

  “Is it cold today? I hadn’t noticed, since I’m always cold these days. I rarely use the fireplace. Would you like me to turn up the central heat?”

  “That’s not what I meant. Can I see your fireplace?”

  Ivan gave me a strange look, but motioned me through to the living room.

  I scooped up a handful of ashes from Ivan’s fireplace and brought them back to his study. There, I smeared the ashes onto the page of Non Degenera Alchemia that the book always opened to, the one with the Latin that had brought Dorian to life.

  “What are you doing?” Ivan cried. “You will ruin the book!”

  “I don’t think so.” I spread the cold gray ashes across the paper. “If I’m right, I’m revealing its true meaning.”

  I had assumed that the ruined stone buildings illustrated in Not Untrue Alchemy were what they appeared to be: fragmentary ruins that symbolized death. But that was only half of the story. Death and resurrection. That’s what we were missing.

  Before our eyes, the ashes turned the opaque pages translucent. Remaining on the transparent paper was the black ink of the illustrated plates. The individual woodcuts that showed desolate landscapes with crumbling ruins weren’t what they had seemed. They weren’t barren landscapes at all. Five illustrations were lined up, and their individual pieces made up a coherent whole.

  The backgrounds of crumbling remains weren’t ruins at all. Together, they revealed one intact building.

  A cathedral.

  Twenty-Nine

  There was even more to Not Untrue Alchemy than I had imagined. Alchemists love codes, using them out of necessity from a time when they were persecuted, but also, I suspected, because they like to feel clever. This was a deeper level of hidden meaning than I’d ever encountered. The woodcut illustrations weren’t only coded images themselves, but worked with a trigger.

  But even with my breakthrough in the book, I didn’t know enough to save Dorian. The cathedral had no identifying features. It could have been one of a hundred cathedrals. Even if I could identify which one, what did that tell me?

  It was mid-afternoon when I returned home, but I’d been too sick with worry to eat anything. I was falling into old patterns. I forced myself to drink the last of my healing lemon balm–infused tea, and I found lentil and cucumber salad leftovers. I brought the late lunch to the back porch overlooking my half-thrivi
ng, half-depleted garden, and forced myself to eat. Before I’d finished, I heard the sound of someone approaching. A moment later, Brixton dropped his bike next to the porch.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be helping your mom at the teashop after school?”

  “Since there aren’t any pastries today, there’s hardly anyone there. My mom’s teas aren’t nearly as good as Blue’s.”

  “Come inside, Brix. There’s something I need to tell you.”

  “Mom said you were too sick to cook today, so I already know it’s Dorian who’s sick. What’s wrong with him? I thought you were going to heal him. I brought over some Stumptown coffee for him.”

  “That was thoughtful. But he’s not here.”

  Brixton gave me a look that suggested I’d sprouted a second head. “It’s daytime. He has to be here.”

  “That’s the problem,” I said.

  “His mind is going, too, and he wandered off? That sucks. Why aren’t you out looking for him?”

  “He’s not outside. The police took him into custody. My stone gargoyle statue is a piece of evidence.”

  “How can they do that?” Brixton sputtered. “Did he get caught somewhere he wasn’t supposed to be and turned to stone to save himself?”

  I forced myself to keep my voice calm in front of Brixton. “You’ve seen how his left leg has been turning back to stone more quickly than the rest of him. His toe broke off at the theater. The man who was killed was found clutching it in his hand.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense! Why would he care about a piece of stone?”

  “I don’t know. But Dorian is now evidence in the investigation.”

  “Prison break,” Brixton said. “That’s your plan, right? We can’t leave him in there.”

  “I don’t have magical powers that allow me to walk into a secured evidence facility.”

  Brixton balled his fingers into fists. “Then what are we supposed to do?”

  I hesitated. Though Brixton was the one person I could talk to about Dorian, he was still a kid. He was on the verge of becoming a man, but his actions continued to remind me that the transformation wasn’t yet complete. I couldn’t tell him that I’d had a breakthrough with Dorian’s book but that it wasn’t enough. That I needed the help of a backward alchemist—both to unlock the secrets of Not Untrue Alchemy and to wrap up the murder investigation so I could get Dorian back.

  “I’m thinking about what to do,” I said. “Right now, I need to do a few things around the house. You can raid the last of Dorian’s cooking from the fridge before you go.”

  “You have a plan you’re not telling me, don’t you? That’s why you want me to leave.”

  “I have a friend coming to visit. I need to get ready—”

  “A friend is coming to visit? Don’t you care about Dorian at all?”

  “Of course I care!” I snapped. I was surprised by how much his words hurt. “That’s why Tobias is coming for a visit. He’s an alchemist. I thought he could help.”

  “I thought you didn’t know any alchemists anymore. Or are you lying to me about everything? After what happened earlier this year, and after Ethan and Veronica’s joke, I thought you were the one person I could trust.”

  I’d hurt Brixton too. He’d been let down by so many people. Not only had a trusted authority figure betrayed his trust earlier that year, but his stepdad’s absence must have weighed heavily on him. He refused to talk about his mom’s absentee husband, Abel, so I didn’t know the whole story. But because of Brixton’s refusal to speak of him, I suspected it wasn’t good.

  “I only just found Tobias. I knew him a long time ago, but we lost touch and until yesterday I didn’t even know he was alive.”

  Brixton squinted his eyes with confusion. To someone raised in the modern world, it’s pretty unbelievable to not have instant access to anyone you wanted to find.

  “He’s flying to Portland tomorrow,” I continued. “Only … ”

  “What?”

  What I wanted to say was that since Dorian was gone, I didn’t know what good Tobias’s visit would do. Instead, I said, “I wish I didn’t have to wait until tomorrow for Tobias to arrive.”

  As soon as Brixton left, I climbed to the attic and rooted through a box until I found the object I was after. I held it up. The copper hadn’t even rusted. Perfect.

  I waited five minutes, then slipped out of the house. I put “Accidental Life” on the cassette player to give me courage, and drove to the theater.

  The police tape had been removed, and the magicians’ SUV was parked in front of the theater. I banged on the back door until Peter opened it.

  “I told you not to open the doors,” Penelope’s muted voice could be heard behind him.

  “I know what you are,” I said, pushing my way past Peter into the dark backstage area, and onward to the stage where I could see them clearly. “And I know what you’re doing here. I’m not interested in exposing you. I don’t care that you’re after the Lake Loot—”

  “Call the police, Pen,” Peter said. “Zoe Faust is unwell. Delusional, I’d say.”

  “Hear me out,” I said. “If you help me, I won’t tell the police that I know the real reason you’re in town—”

  A cell phone materialized in Peter’s fingers. His sleight of hand was good.

  Penelope put her hand on top of Peter’s. Her red lacquered nails caught the light and for a moment it looked as if her fingertips had been dipped in blood. “We’re not calling the police.”

  “But—” Peter protested.

  “Didn’t you hear what she said? She knows, Peter. I could tell she knew. That ruse with the gargoyle … ”

  “How?” The muscles on Peter’s neck looked like they were ready to pop out. I only hoped he didn’t have an aneurism before he could help me. “How did you know? I took steps so no one would piece it together.”

  “Never allowing your photo to be taken was a good try,” I said, “but there’s a photo in a book from the 1970s on Portland murders.”

  “Damn. I went to all the trouble of taking down that website, but a real book … ” He shook his head and pursed his lips.

  “How did you do it?” I asked. “It was backward alchemy, wasn’t it? I’m not judging you. It’s why I think you can help me—”

  “Help you?” His eyes widened and then narrowed. His mouth followed suit, as if he was struggling for words.

  “Don’t lie to me!” I said. “I have nothing more to lose.”

  For the next few moments, the three of us stood staring at each other, sizing each other up.

  Penelope cleared her throat. The sound echoed through the empty theater. “Are you wearing chain mail under your blouse?”

  Chain mail was the object from my boxes that I’d taken as a precautionary measure. I may have been acting somewhat recklessly by venturing to the theater alone, but when confronting a man who had killed before and his knife-throwing wife, I wasn’t going to be completely defenseless.

  “Are we on Candid Camera?” Peter asked. “As you know, I hate cameras. I’ll never consent to being featured on television.”

  “I don’t care what you’ve done,” I said. “I’m not going to turn you in. Going to the police is against my interests as well.”

  “We didn’t kill that man,” Penelope said. “That hasn’t got anything to do with the loot. We’re not doing anything illegal.”

  “Even better,” I said, playing along. “Then you won’t mind helping me with this.” I pulled two photographs of Dorian’s book from my bag. “Please. It’s important. It’s a matter of life and death, or I wouldn’t be asking.”

  Peter’s expression was even more perplexed than before. “What does this have to do with the riches my father was accused of stealing?”

  “Your father?”

  “Franklin Thorne. You said you’
d figured out my secret and that we’re back in Portland to find his hidden treasures. But you’ve only got half the story. I don’t care about the money. I’m back because he was innocent. I’m here to clear his name.”

  Thirty

  “You’re not Franklin Thorne?” I said.

  “What are you talking about?” Peter said. “He was killed in 1969. I know theater makeup can do wonders, but you really think I’m ninety-five?”

  Peter Silverman wasn’t an alchemist who’d used backward alchemy to recover from a shootout with the police after he killed a man. I had the same biases as everyone else. I saw what I expected to see. What I wanted to see.

  Before I could think of how to respond, someone else spoke up.

  “No way!” a young voice said from the shadows.

  Brixton? It couldn’t be. He stepped onto the stage, the squeaking of his sneakers’ rubber soles the only sound in the nearly deserted theater.

  “I don’t know how you’re here,” I said, “but we’re leaving.” I put my hands on his shoulders to steer him back outside. “Sorry to have intruded,” I called over my shoulder.

  Brixton shrugged free. “You should be better at checking the back of your truck before you drive off,” he said. “I could have been an axe murderer! Anyway, I knew you were up to something. Hi guys, I’m—”

  “Not telling them your name,” I said sharply.

  “How very maternal of you,” Penelope said. “He’s too old to be your son. Younger brother?”

  “Neighbor,” Brixton said.

  “I can read your mind,” Peter said casually, slowly circling the two of us, “so there’s no need for you to voluntarily tell me your name.”

  “Very funny,” Brixton said.

  “I thought so, Brixton Taylor,” Peter said.