Doctor Illuminatus

by Martin Booth

  “This is all rubbish!” Tim retorted.

  “Tim!” Pip remonstrated.

  Tim looked sheepish and said, “Not about your mother. I mean . . . Well, how can you be nearly six centuries old? It makes no sense.”

  “I have much to explain,” Sebastian admitted, “and you will find what I tell you to be fantastical. Yet I swear to you that all I say shall be the truth, for I live by the truth and will bear no falsehood. I know not where to begin and so will tell you that, although I am but twelve years of age, I have existed for hundreds of years. My age is calculated not by the calendar, but by how long I have been awake.”

  “Awake!” Tim exclaimed.

  “Now that might just make a bit of sense,” Pip said, thoughtfully. “You mean you sort of hibernate.”

  “That is one means by which to explain it,” Sebastian replied.

  “But animals only hibernate for a few months,” Tim reasoned. “Like a tortoise or a bear, going through the winter. They don’t turn off for years.”

  “Lungfish do,” Pip said. “I saw a documentary on the Discovery Channel. They can lie dormant in dried mud for years.”

  “Does he look like a fish to you?” Tim rejoined.

  “My father,” Sebastian said quietly, “discovered a potion, which he called aqua soporiferum, the water that induces sleep. By means of this, one can slow the functions of the body. When I am not awake, my heart beats but six times an hour and I breathe but once in twenty minutes, and then only shallowly. My body cools and, as it does so, my brain ceases to function in the ordinary fashion.”

  “But how do you wake up?” Pip wanted to know. “What makes you?”

  “That I shall tell you soon,” Sebastian said. “But now, I must request of you some food, for I have a terrible hunger now that my thirst is slaked.”

  Tim checked that they were alone in the house, and they went downstairs to the kitchen, where Pip set about preparing a meal for Sebastian. There wasn’t much in the cupboards except cans and jars brought from the previous house, but she found a beef and ale pie in a flat, circular tin and heated it up in the oven. While that was cooking she gave him a bowl of cream of tomato soup and slices of bread and butter. Whatever was placed before him, Sebastian ate with gusto, wolfing it down as if he were starving. He also drank a liter of milk and a Pepsi, which, he remarked, tasted most curious.

  “We’ve got to get you some different clothes,” Tim commented as Sebastian started on a packet of chocolate digestive biscuits. “Yours look as if they’re about to fall apart.”

  “Would you like to wash while we find you something to wear?” Pip asked.

  “I should very much like to bathe,” Sebastian said, “for my flesh is still cold. As for my clothes, they are over sixty years old. They were, briefly, my school uniform. Just for the summer term of 1939. A truancy officer visited the house and my uncle and aunt had to send me to school to comply with his demands. On the third of September, war was declared with Nazi Germany. There was much confusion thereafter that autumn, so I did not return.”

  “What about when you were . . .” Tim was not sure how to phrase it, “. . . when you were a little boy? Didn’t you go to school then?”

  “Indeed not. There were the universities at Oxford and Cambridge, but schools were very few. The monasteries educated young boys, but, mostly, only if they were to enter the service of Our Lord. The King’s College of Our Lady at Eton beside Windsor was not founded until the year I was — or, rather, I would have been — ten. And the Church was not to be my destiny.”

  “So who taught you?” Tim asked.

  “My father taught me. I was to follow his profession. It was the way then.”

  With the dirty plates in the dishwasher, they took Sebastian upstairs and ran a hot bath for him. While he lay in the steaming water, Tim went into his room, where, after rummaging about in his chest of drawers, he produced a pair of jeans, a T-shirt and sweatshirt, as well as a pair of underpants and socks. In place of Sebastian’s shoes, he found a pair of old sneakers. Hoping the clothes would fit, he pushed them around the bathroom door.

  “Now you look the man!” Tim said, as the new Sebastian entered Pip’s room. “I’m sorry if the shoes whiff a bit.”

  Sebastian studied himself in Pip’s full-length mirror, evidently pleased by what he had been given.

  “You said you were to follow in your father’s footsteps. Is that right?” Pip asked.

  “In a manner of speaking, yes.”

  “What did your father do?” Tim inquired. Sebastian turned from the mirror to face them both. “My father,” he said, “was the court alchemist to King Henry the Fifth and King Henry the Sixth.”

  “An alchemist ... .” Pip began.

  From outside came the sound of a car door slamming shut.

  Tim ran to the window and hissed, “Mum and Dad are back.”

  Sebastian went quickly to the open panel in the wall and eased himself through it.

  “I shall return,” he said, his face framed by the sides of the secret door. “Be ready after midnight. I have much yet to tell and show you.”

  Pip and Tim slid the bed towards the window so as not to obstruct the hidden entrance, then went downstairs, ready to explain away the empty tins in the bin and the dirty plates in the dishwasher.

  After tea, Pip and Tim walked down to the river. Beneath the overhang of a weeping willow stood an old oak bench. It had clearly not been used in a long while, for the slats of the seat were mottled with lichen and the back was stained with dried squirts of bird droppings. Half submerged in the water was a rowing boat, its rotting mooring rope still tied to a root of the willow. The evening sun shone through the trees across the water meadows on the far bank. In a reedy creek over the river, an unseen moorhen was calling. Beyond it, a heron stalked meticulously through the long buttercup-and daisy-filled grass, watching for frogs, newts or eels.

  Side by side, they sat on the bench. It was some minutes before Tim finally spoke.

  “Do you actually think he’s for real?”

  Pip considered all that had happened and said, “What other explanation can there be?”

  “He can be lying through his teeth,” Tim remarked. “I mean, it’s ridiculous! He says he’s twelve going on six hundred. The oldest person ever to have lived was only a hundred and twenty-two. I looked it up on the Internet. As for hibernation: a few months, maybe, but years at a stretch?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” Pip replied. “What about a coma? People can be in a coma for years.”

  “And then they die,” Tim said. “Comas are caused by brain damage.”

  “Sometimes they come out of it. No one knows why. What if,” Pip speculated, “you could control a coma? Like, with meditation? So it’s not a coma but a sort of a trance. And there’s something else. When some young children fall through the ice on freezing ponds, it’s sometimes up to thirty minutes before the rescuers get them out. You’d think they’d drown, but they don’t. With the sudden shock of hitting the icy water, they stop breathing and their brains close down. He told us his body went cold. What’s more, he said his father had found out how to do it.”

  “All right,” Tim allowed. “But what about his father being an alchemist? You know what alchemists did? Or said they did, more like.” He did not wait for his sister’s response. “They turned iron into gold. Like, yes?” He gave a short, sarcastic laugh. “And we’re meant to believe he was an expert in human medicine too? C’mon, sis, wake up and smell the toast burning.”

  “But,” Pip persisted, “if he was lying, then what’s the truth? He came out of a secret passage in an old house, dressed in clothes Grandad would have worn as a schoolboy. And the way he talks. It’s not exactly Bart Simpson, is it?”

  Tim picked up a twig and tossed it into the river. The moorhen, alarmed by the splash, took to the wing, its feet stepping across the surface as if it were walking upon the water.

  “Dungeons and Dragons,” he replied,
watching as the moorhen veered clumsily and vanished into a bed of bulrushes. “He could have picked up that kind of thing watching Robin Hood movies.”

  “Maybe . . .” Pip mused.

  They stood up and set off along the riverbank. The grounds of Rawne Barton included a quarter of a mile of river frontage and, as they walked in silence, Tim watched out for likely pools and eddies where trout might linger and he might fly-fish for them.

  “In some ways, he’s scary,” Pip went on. “He seems so . . . so self-contained. And what was all that about living in a dangerous time and having to be certain of us? When he stared at us, I went all goose pimply.”

  “Look, when a teacher stands in front of the class, glares at you and says, ‘Right, who shoved a pencil up the classroom hamster’s bottom? Own up or else,’ you feel like that, don’t you? Even though you didn’t do it, and you know you didn’t do it, you still feel squirmy. It’s the same thing.”

  “Yes,” Pip replied. “And yet . . .”

  It was not until they reached the hedge marking the boundary with the neighboring farm fields, and turned to walk back across the pasture to the house, that they spoke again.

  “The thing is,” Tim said, “whatever the facts are, do we trust him?”

  “He did say he’d tell the truth,” Pip reminded her brother. “Besides, what have we got to lose? We don’t know anyone around here and we probably won’t meet anyone before the term starts. That’s the whole summer away.”

  In the glow of the late sun, the brickwork of the house seemed to radiate a deep, abiding warmth, the sunlight on the windows looking as if the building were alight with a mysterious fire. The shadows of the ancient trees were long upon the grass.

  As they drew near to the house, Tim said, “Anyway, I bet he turns out to be just a local lamebrain. Still,” he finished, “you’re right. We might as well hang out with him. There’s no one else.”

  Three

  Sub Terra

  Pip lay fully dressed on her bed, listening. Not for the first time, she checked her alarm clock. The digital numbers flickered — 12:14.

  There was a quiet, metallic rattle. Pip watched the latch on her bedroom door slowly lift and click. Gradually, bit by bit, the door opened and a dark figure entered. The door closed quietly.

  “Has he turned up?” the figure whispered, barely audible.

  “No. Not yet.”

  Tim switched on his Mini Maglite, running the narrow beam quickly over the wall panel. Pip could see he was also fully dressed, in jeans and a dark sweatshirt.

  “Snug under a duvet somewhere,” Tim muttered ruefully.

  Yet no sooner had he spoken than there came slight scuffling sounds from within the wall. The panel opened to show Sebastian’s face hanging as if suspended in the darkness.

  “Hello,” he murmured. “I regret my tardiness. Sometimes when I awake it takes me a few days to adjust.”

  “A bit like being jet-lagged,” Pip suggested.

  “Like he would know?” said Tim. “They had intercontinental jet travel in the 1400s?”

  Sebastian stepped out into the room. He was wearing the clothes Tim had found for him but, over the T-shirt, he had added a sort of coarse, woolen, long-sleeved pullover with a square-cut neck. It hung loosely upon him as if it were several sizes too big. Upon the front was sewn, in silver thread, a design like a jag of lightning.

  “Cool jersey,” Tim remarked.

  “It is a tabard,” Sebastian explained. “Men wore it to cover their armor.” He adjusted it over his shoulders. “I wish now to take you to my chamber,” he added. “It is not far.” Reaching out, he touched both of them lightly on the arm. “Will you follow me?” he said softly. “Take care, for the steps are much worn in the center.”

  With that, he stepped back towards the wall and seemed to disappear without even having to bend down.

  Pip went first, sitting on the floor and lowering herself feet first through the panel, to discover a tightly spiraled staircase beyond it. With her hands pressed to the wall on either side, she started to descend. The glimmer of Tim’s flashlight behind her was the only source of light.

  Reaching the bottom of the steps, some of which were — as Sebastian had warned — well worn, Pip was confronted by a low and narrow stone passageway. The roof was arched and the floor set with flagstones. Sebastian was waiting there.

  “We have but a short distance remaining,” he said, adding, “and Tim, will you please extinguish your source of light?”

  “But it’s as black as a badger’s hole down here,” Tim replied.

  “You will not require illumination,” Sebastian explained. “The way will show itself unto you.”

  As Pip started off down the passage, Tim switched off his flashlight and immediately felt disoriented. It was as if he were suddenly suspended in a black liquid. He reached out to feel the wall, partly to comfort himself and partly to keep his balance. The stones were cool and surprisingly dry.

  “Touch not the wall,” Sebastian said.

  His voice seemed far off. Tim reckoned he had already gone some way down the passage, although there had been no sound of his retreating footsteps.

  “You there, Pip?” Tim asked.

  “Over here,” she replied, yet her voice also seemed distant.

  Without being exactly sure that he was heading in the right direction, Tim took a tentative step forward. When he did not bang his head against the wall, he took another, then another, then another. It seemed as if he were not so much walking as the floor of the passageway was shifting under him, like a slow-moving treadmill in a gym.

  Suddenly, the passage ended in an open door made of heavy planks of dark wood joined together with iron bolts. Although Tim was sure she had been some way ahead of him in the passage, Pip was only just passing through the door as he arrived, a few steps away.

  Sebastian was waiting for them in a large, vaulted chamber lit by four candles set in bronze wall mountings. It was about ten meters square and four high. At the center of the arched ceiling the ribs of the vaulting met in a large stone boss into which was mounted an iron hook. From this hung an iron gantry and a series of chains and pulleys. In the middle of the room stood a vast oak table upon which was arranged a collection of glass retorts and copper distillation condensers, a tripod, ceramic dishes, iron or pewter bowls, a mortar made of alabaster, racks of bottles and a pile of leather-bound volumes.

  A library of other books lined shelves on one wall, stretching from floor to ceiling, the top levels reached by a set of sliding library steps fixed to brass runners on the penultimate shelf. In an alcove opposite the door was a stone platform with several thickly fleeced sheepskins spread upon it. Animal hides covered the floor like carpets. The only other furniture consisted of several high stools by the table, some lower stools and two massive oak chests with iron padlocks from which protruded enormous keys. The whole place smelled of dust, stone and something sweet, like dried orange peel.

  “This is my domain,” Sebastian announced. “It is humble, yet it serves my purpose well, for I have no need of greater comforts.”

  “Where exactly are we?” Pip asked, as she and Tim gazed around themselves in amazement.

  Sebastian avoided the question. “Please,” he indicated two of the low stools, “be seated, for we must talk.”

  As Pip and Tim lowered themselves onto the stools, Sebastian went to the table and, taking a bottle from a rack, pulled the cork.

  “I wish to show you something,” he said. “You need not be afraid, but it will be strange.” He held the bottle out. “Close your eyes and, when I request it, inhale through your nose. Not too deeply. No more than you would to smell a delicately scented flower.”

  Pip closed her eyes. Tim followed her example, although with some hesitation. Sebastian held the bottle under their nostrils for a few moments, then, corking it again, said, “Open your eyes.”

  “Wow!” Tim exclaimed, his hands gripping the seat of his stool as if he were
afraid it might suddenly throw him off.

  The entire room seemed vast, like a cathedral nave. The walls were deep purple and the flagstones seemed to be shifting as if turning to liquid.

  “What do you hear, Pip?” Sebastian asked. “Weird music,” Pip replied. “It sounds like . . .” she sought for the right description “. . . like the song of whales.”

  “Close your eyes once more and take a deep breath,” Sebastian ordered.

  They did as they were told and, when they opened their eyes again, the chamber was as it had been.

  “How did you ... .” Tim began.

  “With ease,” Sebastian said, grinning. “And, in time, you shall understand.” He perched himself upon one of the tall stools and looked down at them. “First, I must ask you if you know of alchemy.”

  “It’s a sort of magic, isn’t it?” Tim ventured. “People tried to turn iron into gold with it.”

  “It is what today you would call science,” Sebastian explained. “It has many aims, of which the transmutation of base metal into gold was but one. In the main, the alchemist aspired first to transform common and useless substances into rare, useful matter; second, to prolong life indefinitely and cure disease and aging; third, to produce life from nonliving matter, ultimately to create a homunculus.”

  “A what?” Pip asked.

  “A homunculus is an artificial human being, born not of woman.”

  “Like an android?”

  “Somewhat,” Sebastian replied.

  “This is all crapola!” Tim retorted. “Making gold out of scrap iron and men out of mud.”

  “Perhaps not,” Sebastian said. “Consider what science has already achieved. Cannot gold be fashioned in a thermonuclear reactor? Or diamonds created from carbon under intense pressure and heat? Have not rare elements — the actinides — been produced by men? Nobelium, lawrencium with a half-life of but thirteen seconds, mendelevium, made by bombarding einsteinium with alpha particles in a particle accelerator . . .”

  As he spoke, Pip and Tim just looked at him. Pip wondered how on Earth he knew so much, especially when he had spent all but twelve years or so of the last six centuries asleep and had presumably only recently woken up. It was then she remembered the headmaster mentioning the old man’s nephew. He must have seen Sebastian. As for Tim, he was curious about what half-life meant and what actinides were, and resolved to look them up on the Web at the first opportunity.