by Bill Bunn
He pushed his chair away from the table and stood. “I can’t help you, Aunt Shannon. You need to face the truth. Nothing will bring her back…Nothing.” He couldn’t stop the tears any longer. But before anyone could see him, he fled the room, into the hallway, just out of sight. Peeking around the doorjamb, he could still see his aunt and uncle at the table.
Aunt Shannon sat quietly for a moment. Uncle Edward glanced at her. “You shouldn’t be getting that boy mixed up in all your flim-flam. You’re going to end up getting him or yourself hurt…again.” He emphasized the last word in his sentence carefully.
Steve’s tears fell silently. He mopped them up with his shirt sleeves.
Aunt Shannon smiled in a way that seemed like she, too, might cry. “Edward,” she said sharply, “Stop it. Just because you’ve never liked alchemy doesn’t mean other people should feel that way.”
“Listen, you already lost Richard….” Uncle Edward continued.
“That’s not fair!” Her face twisted in agony. “Are you going to make me pay for that the rest of my life?”
“He was our only son,” Uncle Edward said quietly.
“I couldn’t have stopped him, and you know it,” Aunt Shannon said firmly.
A minute or two passed in silence. Steve wiped his eyes with his hands.
“It is going to be more difficult than I thought,” she mused. “I do have a couple of tricks up my sleeve, though. I think I should introduce him to Lindsay Locket.”
Uncle Edward snorted.
“What’s so funny, Edward? She’s a clever one, and she’s catching on to my hocus-pocus quite quickly, thank you very much. For your information, she already knows how to make her Benu stone. She just needs to find it.” She paused and stared into her teacup, as if looking for hints of the future. “We’re going to find Steve’s mother if it kills us.”
“Be careful,” Uncle Edward replied. “It just might.”
Steve had heard enough. From the hallway he tiptoed to his room.
“I want to go home,” she wept, standing on the edge of a lake. The face before her showed no emotion.
“That isn’t a possibility. You belong to us now. You won’t be going home again.”
She continued to weep, thinking of her husband, Doug, and her son Steve. “They’ll never know what happened.”
“They don’t need to know.”
“What are you going to do to me?” she asked, as bravely as she could.
“I think you can guess.”
She began to cry again.
It was twilight. On this night, her last.
“OK,” she said at last. “I’m ready.”
Deep grief wracked her body as the dissection began. And after a while, she couldn’t feel anything anymore.
Steve brushed his teeth in front of the bathroom mirror. He didn’t look very happy or healthy. His nose poked out a bit too far from his skinny face and hollow cheeks. His features shared space with several red dots of acne and freckles. His forehead was a bit too high. His teeth looked too big for his mouth. A crop of short, spiky hair, flaming red, glowed atop his head. His green eyes were rimmed with red.
There’s nothing great about me.
The mirror seemed to agree. He daubed toothpaste onto a finger, and touched the red spots with the paste. This made things a little better.
His conversation with Aunt Shannon had stirred up the mud of old feelings.
It’s going to be hard to fall asleep tonight.
At home, he would have watched a few SpongeBob episodes on Netflix. SpongeBob helped him forget and smile. He returned to his bedroom and pulled out his iPod, checking for open wireless connections. There were several networks in the area, but all of them were secure.
No SpongeBob tonight.
He prepared for bed quickly and slid under the covers with the bedside lamp on. On the nightstand, among the knickknacks, sat an old book. Steve picked it up. He read the title—The Way of Alchemy. The author, Graham Pankratz.
No doubt Aunt Shannon placed this strategically.
He could feel the clouds of negativity darken and grow, so chose to read to distract him from his thoughts.
“Books, the original iPods,” he said aloud.
The book’s cover was tooled leather, well used. He batted the cover open. Someone had scrawled a greeting on the inside cover: “To William Durant Pankratz, January 19, 1805.”
Aunt Shannon’s maiden name is Pankratz. So was my mom’s.
Obviously this was some old relative, somehow tied to his family through his mother. He riffled through the book’s pages, stopping at the occasional picture. There were drawings of laboratory instruments and odd symbols. Pictures of creepy people. He paused on a page with a woodcut of a dragon eating its own tail. The caption underneath the drawing read “Immortality and the Elixir of Life—the Ouroboros.”
In the middle of the book there were some disgusting photographs of human body parts. Evidently these were part of the alchemist’s experimentation. He thumbed through the last few pages, reading a paragraph here and there. The words seemed like an odd mix of the Bible, magic, and science. He turned to the first chapter, “Of Alchemical Philosophy,” and began to skim.
One paragraph jumped from the page:
The Benu stone is the central goal of the alchemist’s work. Once successfully made, the stone is used to transform one thing into another. Traditionally, many have understood that, with this stone, lead could be transformed into gold. However, more recent alchemists have begun to experiment with the idea that the Benu stone may lead to transformations of a more general nature, not merely a transformation from lead into gold.
Somewhere in the middle of Chapter Two, his head began to nod with sleep, but by then he had a feeling for Alchemy—test tubes, experiments, fire, and water, and the hunger for change. Sleep called him as he clung to the page’s words until his eyes blurred and the book fell to his chest and slipped to the floor. With his mind brimming and aflame with strange thoughts, Steve fell asleep.
In the morning he rolled out of bed, hoping to find some sugary cereal squirreled away in one of the kitchen cupboards. When he got to the kitchen, he found Aunt Shannon sitting in a chair with a cup of tea in her hand, reading Steve’s mother’s journal. A stranger, a girl about Steve’s age, sat beside her.
“Good morning, Steve,” Aunt Shannon said. “I’d like you to meet a friend of mine. This is Lindsay Locket.”
Lindsay shot Steve a cold, polite smile. She seemed smart. Maybe a tad geeky. Long golden hair framed her face, with a piercing pair of azure eyes. Braces, yes. Possibly. Hard to remember because her eyes were so distracting. He realized that his housecoat hung loosely about his shoulders and his hair was a greasy fireworks display, his face dotted with dried dots of toothpaste. In a flash, he wrapped the lapels of the housecoat together, cinching the belt tight around his waist with an impossible knot. His face glowed as red as a pimple.
“Ah… um… m-m-morning,” he stuttered as he pulled open a couple of cupboard doors quickly, hiding his head behind them. “Do you have any cereal?”
“You mean breakfast cereal? No, we have porridge for breakfast. I made some for you this morning and left it on the stove there.” She pointed to a battered pot blurping on the stove. “Lindsay is keen on learning the alchemist tradition, too, Steve. She can’t stay very long this morning, but she just lives across the street.”
“Oh.” Steve’s voice echoed off the back of the cupboard.
Duck Boy. Duck Boy.
“I really have to be going now, Aunt Shannon,” Lindsay said smoothly. “Maybe… ah… I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“See you then, dear,” Aunt Shannon said in an overly sweet tone. “Aren’t you going to say goodbye to our guest, Steve?”
“Bye,” Steve grunted to the back of the cupboard, as Lindsay walked to the front hall.
Steve groaned quietly into a group of porcelain figurines in front of his nose. He heard the girl’s feet thump gen
tly down the short set of stairs, and the front door open and close.
Great—a surprise visit from a girl while I look like a serial killer.
He backed out of the cupboard doors and headed to the porridge pot on the stove, catching his own reflection in the pot’s lid. His face ballooned and twisted in the reflection of the dented chrome lid. The lid seemed to say it all.
And porridge is such a drag.
“You didn’t have to be rude,” Aunt Shannon said when she returned to the kitchen. “It’s quite impolite to hide from guests.”
“Well, you could have warned me you planned to have company,” Steve answered.
“You always need to be prepared for surprises, Steve.”
Aunt Shannon crossed the kitchen to peer out a window into the morning’s frosty face.
“It’s sunny, but a biting frost in the air,” she muttered. “Too cold for my old bones.” Her gaze rose from the landscape toward the sky. “Edward, are we having trouble with our phones again?” she asked.
“Dunno,” Edward replied from somewhere else in the house.
“Someone is working on the lines again,” she said thoughtfully. She stood and mused for a moment, letting the morning sun warm her hands and face.
While his aunt and uncle talked, Steve had been working his way through each of the cupboards, looking for a bowl for his porridge.
“Bowls are in that cupboard, there,” Aunt Shannon said cheerily, with a finger pointed towards a bottom cupboard next to the fridge. Steve opened it and found several hundred vinyl records stacked in piles in the same cupboard. “You’ll find the bowls in behind the Country and Western albums.”
Records. How retro.
“All right,” Steve grunted. He reached behind the stack of records—the album on the top featured a picture of a horse and a woman swinging a lasso. His hand found a small stack of bowls and pulled one out of the pile.
“Why are the bowls behind your records?” Steve asked.
“Because music is more important than food, dear. I can skip breakfast once in a while, but I simply cannot live without music. Spoons are in the fridge,” Aunt Shannon added, before Steve had the time to search for them.
Steve trotted over to the refrigerator and scoured the inside for a couple of minutes before he found the spoons in the “Cheese and Butter” compartment. He resisted the temptation to ask the obvious question.
As he moved to the stove to take a small helping, Aunt Shannon turned from the window to the stove and grabbed the porridge pot. Steve sighed and held out his bowl, and she blobbed in the entire batch, filling it to the brim.
“I really don’t want that much,” he objected quietly. “I’m usually not very hungry in the morning.”
“You ought to be very hungry—just look at you,” Aunt Shannon replied firmly. “Eat all of it. You’re too skinny.” She squinted. “And what are those dots on your face?”
Steve sighed.
“Don’t give me any attitude, young man,” Aunt Shannon said sharply. “You need to eat well, even if you don’t want to be an alchemist.”
He rolled his eyes and began to walk out of the kitchen, back to his room, to eat.
“Where are you going?” Aunt Shannon asked.
“I’m going to eat in my room.”
“Sit down here in the kitchen,” Aunt Shannon ordered. “Food belongs in the kitchen.”
“Country and Western records belong next to your record player,” Steve quipped.
“You’ll eat in the kitchen, young man,” Aunt Shannon commanded. “Sit.”
Steve returned to the kitchen table to avoid any more confrontations.
“Now what do I need to do today?” Aunt Shannon asked herself. “Oh, yes. I need to call the library.”
“Why don’t you just tell them that you lost the books and pay for them?” Uncle Edward asked. “Sooner or later they’re going to catch on.”
“I’ll find them, Edward,” Aunt Shannon replied.
Uncle Edward sighed and returned to his book.
“I’m heading to a book sale this morning,” he informed them, shaking his head while he read. “I’ll see you two this afternoon.”
“See you, Edward,” Aunt Shannon replied. “Bundle up warmly. And don’t forget your bus pass.” She turned to Steve, parked behind the steaming bowl of porridge. “Now, young man, let’s talk while you eat your breakfast.”
Steve gave a feeble smile and limply picked up his spoon as Aunt Shannon looked on. “Got any sugar?” he asked with a grimace.
His aunt returned to the kitchen sink and opened a cupboard underneath. “There’s a leak in the sink’s plumbing, and that keeps the brown sugar from getting those incorrigible lumps,” she explained, responding to the look on his face. “Thank you for eating your porridge and obliging an old woman, by the way,” she added with a smile. “There’s hope for you yet. At least you can listen to my ideas, even though you don’t agree.”
“Sure.” Steve grimaced. It might even pass as a smile, if he was lucky.
“Did you read that book on your nightstand?” Aunt Shannon asked.
He looked up. “Um, yeah. But, that alchemy stuff is pretty weird. All those experiments with body parts, and burning stuff until it’s blacker than black. It’s absolutely weird.” He stopped for a moment, staring at his bowl of goop. “I thought you said yesterday that alchemy would help find my mom. I don’t think this stuff is going to help. For one thing, changing lead into gold is impossible. And for another, even if we could change lead into gold, it won’t help my mom. If we could invent that ‘elixir of life,’ it would help other people but it wouldn’t help us to find my mom.”
He paused. Aunt Shannon looked thoughtful but didn’t say anything. “Do you really think lead can become gold?” he asked, as if he was checking to see if she was still all there. The cord of thought didn’t seem to reach the outlet of sanity. “I mean, a bit of lead in a beaker isn’t going to change your life, is it?”
“You’re partly right, Steve,” Aunt Shannon answered. “You can’t change lead into gold with a beaker. I do think our ancestors were wrong on that point. But I am quite sure that you can change things. It’s not beakers and lead with a bit of some kind of tincture; that idea is for puffers.”
Steve nodded and pursed his lips. Hopefully it would look as though he understood.
“Sorry, Steve. I can see you don’t know what I’m talking about. Now let me see. A puffer. Hmm. A puffer is an alchemist who doesn’t take alchemy seriously. In the old days, puffers spent a bit of time dabbling in an experiment or two, sending feathery puffs of smoke into the air, but they didn’t commit to the cause.”
“Puffers,” Steve repeated, trying to move her along.
“Right. Well, if you read the old books, most of the ideas you get in those books are wrong. Some people think alchemy is an early type of chemistry. Some treat it like a type of psychology. Some think it’s religious, or it’s about a mystical journey. All these people were right in their way. But the most important fact about alchemy is that it’s real in every way. For a few centuries, alchemy was the frontier of technology. In fact, alchemical history is a cover for genuine alchemy.
“Alchemy has always been about change. Some believe alchemy changes lead into gold. Some believe alchemy changes people. Some believe it changes locations, and of course, the big question has always been how to make that change.”
Steve wanted to stop her, but he could see the fire building in her eyes. Easier to let her continue.
“Alchemists, over the years, have tried many things. They’ve tried secret formulas and potions, trying to cook up change one way or another. In my experiments, I’ve tried nearly all of those things, all the things that others have tried. Beakers, baking, boiling, burning. I haven’t gotten anywhere. But then I stumbled into words.”
She sighed blissfully. “Words. Now that’s where alchemy works. Transformation happens with words much more than beakers. You can change a thing with
words much more easily than you can with fire. I can bend words so many ways, break them, and put them back together again. And when you change a word in just the right way, you change the world.” Aunt Shannon paused to make sure Steve was listening.
“This is where my work has taken me. And it works. I packed up my beakers long ago.”
Steve smiled and nodded. He fought the urge to raise his hand and ask a question.
Will this be on the exam?
The thought made him smile—this time genuinely.
“You don’t believe me, do you?”
Steve shook his head. “I’m sorry Aunt Shannon, I don’t. I would like to, but I can’t.”
“Finish your porridge. I’ll take you to my laboratory and show you an experiment that should prove it completely.”
Steve labored through his bowl of porridge, choking most of it down.
He opened the dishwasher to put his porridge bowl away and found several socks draped in the dish racks.
Aunt Shannon noticed him open the dishwasher and watched as he pulled out the dish racks. “I guess that load is finished now. Let me get those for you.” Aunt Shannon stood and went towards the dishwasher and plucked the socks from the dishwasher. “There you go. Just put your bowl in the bottom rack there.”
Steve nodded and obeyed.
Aunt Shannon walked towards the fridge, opened the freezer and threw the socks she was carrying in, then turned to Steve. “Come on. Let me prove to you that alchemy works.”
She nearly pushed him down the hallway to a bedroom and opened the door. Inside Steve saw her organ shoved up against one wall. On top of the organ lay a drill and various parts of a disassembled lawnmower engine. The floor was littered with boxes filled with odds and sods—pieces of things. And on the far side of the room, a crude workbench: an old door resting on several stacked plastic milk crates. On one end of the bench sat the core of the disassembled lawn mower engine. In the middle of the bench there was a big box of clocks, and next to the box of clocks, the box of Richard’s remains—the same box Aunt Shannon had taken from Steve’s room the night before.