The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane

by Katherine Howe

  “Religious?” Connie asked.

  “Sure,” Janine replied. “The alchemists reasoned by analogy. According to them, the world around us contains meaning, and the patterns of the universe mirror the patterns of our selves. It’s the same kind of thinking that underlies astrology: the movement of stars and planets both mirrors us and influences us, so that if we read them properly we can reveal truths about everyday life. So they started out by trying to sort the world into a set of categories based on similar qualities. You’ve got the sun on one hand, which rules heat, masculinity, progress, dryness, day. And then you’ve got the moon on the other, which is cold, femininity, regression, dampness, night. And every substance consisted of four basic elements: earth, fire, air, and water. And there are four qualities: heat, cold, humidity, and dryness. Everything on earth, they thought, could be described using these categories. Gold, for example, might be a combination of sun, earth, fire, heat, and dryness, which describes its color, texture, usefulness, what have you. I’m just guessing, but you see what I mean.”

  “I think so,” Connie hazarded, unsure if she understood Janine’s point. “It’s just so weird to try to think in those terms. Gold is just an element, right?”

  “Yes, but they didn’t exactly know that in the Middle Ages,” Janine said. “The world was a weird-looking place before we knew about atoms and DNA. They were trying to figure out what its component qualities were, not just to understand the world better but also so that they could try to control it. Alchemy says that these elements and qualities can be manipulated by gifted men, causing substances to change their form beyond what nature intended. They compared the crucible in which metals were melted to the human body, which transforms substances, too—food and water become bone and sinew. Sperm transforms in the body, like a seed in the earth, bringing something out of nothing. So the search for the philosopher’s stone, or the Great Work, required the purest elements and the highest degree of talent. It was like the search for perfectibility, both in substance and in the soul.”

  “But this is all pseudoscience,” Connie protested. “It hasn’t been taken seriously in…” She paused, thinking. “Two hundred years! At least.”

  “Well, that’s not what Chilton argued,” Janine said. “I was there for the talk, and let me tell you, it was a real shocker. The paper dealt with the private journals of respected seventeenth-and eighteenth-century chemists—Isaac Newton among them—who also conducted serious research into what used to be called ‘vegetation of metals’ as the key step. That was a concept that connected the transformation of minerals under heat and pressure with the growth of plants and animals. Manning proposed that the base material in the riddle might be carbon, the basis of all life, which of course can be transformed under heat and pressure to anything from coal to diamond. He claimed that there was one further transmutation for carbon that was out of the reach of current science, but that might be accessible using alchemical techniques.”

  “Techniques?” Connie echoed.

  Janine heaved a small sigh. “Connie, he was arguing that the philosopher’s stone could be real. Essentially, he thought that alchemy shouldn’t be considered as a symbolic way of looking at human thought and reason after all, but should be taken at face value.”

  Connie’s eyes widened, and she imagined her advisor standing at a raised podium, a bright light—the slide projector—splashing a dark red image of a stone across his face and into his eyes. He was pounding his fist on the lectern, and his mouth was moving, but the only sound that she heard was laughter. She blinked, and the image was gone. One hand rose to touch her temple, which had started to throb.

  Janine laughed, continuing. “Gives me a headache, too. Well, of course the conference panel had a field day. Accused him of ahistoricism, at the very best, and of needing a long vacation at the worst.” Janine exhaled through her teeth and dropped her voice even further. “The university president even had a conversation with him afterward. Asked if chairing the department was proving too taxing. That is strictly between you and me, by the way.”

  “That,” said Connie, sitting back on her stool, “is surprising.” It seemed incredible. What had Chilton said? Wait until you have seen what I have to offer. The threatened loss of his chair in the department would be devastating for him.

  “Well,” Janine continued, “you know Manning. You can imagine how he took their reaction. It was a real blow.” She shook her head. “So if he’s being even more strict with you than usual, now you’ll have an idea why. I think he feels like he needs to come back from that to some extent. Rehabilitate his reputation. If he can point to an accomplished protégée who is doing serious, innovative work, then…” She trailed off, reaching her hand forward to finger the key.

  “This is beautiful. Is it antique?” she asked, turning the key in the warm light of the bar.

  Connie said nothing. As she brought the heavy tumbler to her lips, a tongue of liquor sloshed over the rim, and she reached up to clutch the trembling glass with her other hand, smothering its movement before Janine could see.

  THE VOLVO CREAKED TO A HALT, A LARGE DROPLET OF RAINWATER splotching across the windshield. Connie paused, pressing her palm against her chest and feeling her heartbeat thrumming at an uneven pace, like a runner dashing and then stopping to rest, panting, up against a tree. She had told Janine Silva about the bizarre circle symbol burned into her front door, and Janine had responded with shock and concern. What did she mean, burned? Who would want to vandalize her grandmother’s door? What had the police said? Well, so long as she had filed a complaint, she supposed there was nothing else to do. Though it must have been unnerving, especially as Connie was staying there alone. Did she feel safe?

  Connie scowled, glaring out of the car window at the shop front across the street. Another few fat raindrops fell onto the hood and roof, plonking on the metal and rolling down the glass, leaving snail-like trails in their wake. Of course the circle, with its wisps of smoke drifting out of the black scars in the wood, asserted the problem of why much more acutely. Over their hours in the living room after the policemen left, Sam getting up at intervals to cast his flashlight nervously across the yard from the window, no answer was forthcoming. The police are right, it’s just weird kids from Salem, Liz asserted. The explanation satisfied none of them.

  When they could not figure out why the circle had appeared, they turned their attention to its possible meaning. “‘God my helper,’” Liz translated, together with the Greek letters alpha and omega, perhaps another indication of the godhead, the divine that is both the beginning and the end. But beyond that, the word Agla, the bizarre array of crosshatches—it clearly meant something, but they could not fathom what. Finally exhausted by tension and fear, she and Liz retired to the musty four-posters upstairs, not protesting when Sam insisted on staying, flashlight in hand, half-awake in the armchair by the fireplace as dawn started to creep across the sky. Connie shivered at the memory as a rumble of thunder lurked low in the sky, sounding like a beast or monster prowling three streets over.

  The quiet gong rang out as Connie opened the door of Lilith’s Garden: Herbs and Magickal Treasures to find the same earringed woman behind the counter, hair in a giant bun atop her head this time, sorting receipts on the glass-topped counter.

  “Blessed…be,” she said, recognizing Connie, and flipped closed the book that she had been reading, cover facedown.

  “What does Agla mean?” Connie demanded without preamble, hands planted on her hips. How she resented this woman with her ridiculous earrings, the profits of her store built on the dead shoulders of a bunch of innocent people. Connie’s eyes bored into hers, and she perceived that the woman felt herself to be a very kind and sensitive person, intuitive, but that most of her supposed intuition derived from her own soft view of the world. She was not a bad person, this earringed woman—her world was just very padded and small.

  “What?” asked the woman, confused, tensing in her chair behind the cash reg
ister.

  “Agla,” Connie said, too loudly, stepping nearer to the counter. “I want you to tell me what it means. Especially when it appears in some crazy circle surrounded by a bunch of hatch marks.” Her voice tightened, and the woman’s discomfort radiated from her in nearly visible waves.

  “I…I don’t know!” she cried, eyes darting from Connie to the far corners of the little shop.

  “Someone,” Connie said, “burned it into the door of my grandmother’s house. Trying to scare me.” She pressed her palms on the counter as the woman’s eyelids started to flutter. Connie wanted someone else to bear responsibility for the unrelenting fear that had gripped her since the circle appeared. Meanly, she willed this woman to argue with her, to give her an excuse to raise her voice, to vent some of the terror that she had to keep hidden in her everyday life. “Burned it. And I would at least like to know what all the words involved mean.”

  The woman swallowed and looked at Connie with a mixture of alarm and concern. “This circle,” she began. “How…perfect was it?”

  “What do you mean?” Connie asked.

  “I mean, were there any stray burn marks? Variations in the depth of the scoring?” the woman pressed.

  “No,” Connie said, folding her arms.

  The woman opened her mouth to speak, seemed to think better of it, and stood, gesturing to Connie to follow. “That’s what I thought. Come with me,” she said. “I don’t know what it means, but I know where we should look.”

  Connie trailed behind her to the rear corner of the shop, the one with the racks of books on one side and the expired herbs on the other, and the woman plucked a dense tome down from one shelf.

  “Look,” she said, pages ruffling under her fingers. “I know a lot of people in the Wicca community here. And some of them are even level-three initiates, which is really hard to do.” She looked to Connie for a sign of recognition and received none.

  “And a lot of the covens have gotten very adept at conjuration, and make it a part of their sabbaths. But the thing of it is…” She ran her fingertip down the page that she wanted, then turned the book around to indicate an entry to Connie. “Nobody that I know of”—she paused—“nobody has ever been able to manifest a circle like the one you are describing. I know one group that tried once to manifest a circle by making a kind of brand, but it was very small. And even then the burned circle that resulted was incomplete. It pretty much didn’t work.”

  The woman had pulled down a heavy encyclopedia of paganism and the occult, and Connie looked down at the entry under the woman’s finger.

  AGLA. A kabbalist notarikon that is thought to refer to Atah GiborLeolam Adonai, an unspeakable name for God sometimes translated as “Lord God is eternally powerful.” Ref. Appears 1615 in the alchemical treatise Spiegel der Kunst und Natur together with Gott, the German word for God, as well as the Greek letters alpha and omega.

  “The mirror of art and nature,” said Connie aloud, and the woman hovering over her asked, “What is that?”

  “A book title,” said Connie, eyebrows furrowed. “German. From 1615.” She glanced up, meeting the woman’s gaze, and read in her face a concern that felt genuine. Connie shifted the book’s considerable weight back into the woman’s hands and stood, arms crossed, thinking. “Do you think this is the kind of thing that a vandal might put on someone’s door at random?” Connie asked finally, watching her out of the corners of her eyes.

  The earringed woman took a breath, pursing her lips together. “I don’t mean to alarm you,” she said, “but no. A manifestation like that would take a lot of work. Nobody would do it just to do it.”

  The two women regarded each other, the store proprietor’s eyes wide and sensitive, willing Connie to believe her. Connie’s reason rebelled against what she was suggesting—manifestation! What did that even mean? She was implying that someone had simply willed the circle to appear. What a preposterous idea. Wasn’t the world wondrous enough without a lot of make-believe?

  “Look,” the woman began, closing the book and pressing it to her chest, “I know that you don’t believe in the Goddess religion. I can read it in your face.” Connie frowned, not disagreeing with her. “But if you like, I can fix you up a really powerful protective charm.”

  “What?” Connie asked, incredulous.

  “You know. A charm. To make your grandmother feel safer in the house.” The woman’s eyebrows rose, two little sincere quarter-moons over her eyes, and Connie thought, It all comes back to money, doesn’t it.

  “My grandmother has been dead for twenty years,” Connie replied.

  “Suit yourself,” the woman replied, replacing the book on the shelf. “But remember. Just because you don’t believe in something doesn’t mean it isn’t real.”

  Muttering a thank-you, Connie strode to the shop door and yanked it open just as the sky outside broke apart and the rain started to fall like drumsticks beating down on the earth.

  HOURS LATER, AFTER THE RAIN PASSED, CONNIE SAT LISTENING TO THE silence in Granna’s house, broken only by the click of Arlo’s toenails on the wide pine floorboards and the breath of summer air stirring the leaves in the sitting room windows. The air in the house still felt close and heavy. Connie caught herself straining for a sound that seemed on the point of being audible, or glancing over her shoulder as she worked, expecting someone to be standing there. The police said there’s nothing to be afraid of, she reminded herself, heart thudding in her ears. There’s no one. And if there were someone, Arlo would scare them away. Though she found her logic utterly sound she nevertheless, after five more minutes of quiet, twitched her head up, ears open, listening.

  Arlo appeared under her desk chair, tongue extended in a luxurious yawn. Connie reached down to scratch the spot between his shoulder blades as she flipped through her notebook.

  “I really don’t see why you’re so relaxed,” she remarked. “You weren’t even freaked the night we got back from the fireworks and found the burn mark. Not until that cop shined his light in the window, anyway.”

  He rolled onto his side so that her scratching hand could reach under his jaw, his whiskered mouth drawn into a sleepy smile. Mentally Connie gathered her strands of thinking into thick handfuls, trying to braid them into a coherent whole. Deliverance’s book had disappeared from Prudence’s life records, but Grace thought it might have just undergone a transformation of name, or of description. Chilton was furious about her stalled research, but Janine thought his own work was the problem. The Wicca shop woman with all her amulets and sincerity did not know anything concrete about the circle on Connie’s door. Her friends were worried about her staying alone in the house, while her usually nervous dog dozed, a bundle of contentment.

  Connie propped her bare foot on the seat of the chair, pressing her shin against the Chippendale desk. Her notes lay scattered across the desk surface, occasional words leaping out from the blurred mass of her handwriting.

  Home, said one word. Gardin, said another. Almanack. I have staid at home.

  “She tried to sell me a charm,” Connie said to the dog. “Can you believe that?”

  His breathing was slow and deep, a front paw twitching in sleep. She leaned over her notes again, fingers of one hand questing across her desk for something to handle. They settled on a sharp little metal object hidden under some papers in the far corner and picked it up, rolling it to and fro, pressing it for distraction while Connie’s eyes roamed through all her notes on Prudence’s journal. Day after day after day of gardening, weather, passing illnesses, strangers’ babies born and paid for. Prudence’s father dies. Mercy moves in. Josiah, Prudence’s husband, comes and goes from town. Her daughter grows, assumes more responsibility in the house. Mercy dies. Patty moves away. Josiah dies—some kind of accident at the docks. And then, abruptly, in 1798, the journal stops. Her fingers walked the metal item from one digit to another and, squinting, Connie flipped backward in her notebook.

  “‘December 3, 1760.’” she read aloud.
“‘Very cold. Patty unwell. Mother looks for her Almanack. Very vexed when told it given to the Sociall Libar. Makes her poultice. Patty improves.’ Huh,” Connie wondered to the empty house. “Is ‘Sociall Libar’ an abbreviation for ‘Social Library’? What do you think, Arlo?”

  No response from underneath her chair. She looked down and found that the dog had disappeared. “Ingrate,” she said. In her notebook she wrote down the words SOCIAL LIBRARY MARBLEHEAD OR SALEM? in block capital letters, and then drew little asterisks around it. She sat back in her chair, ruminating.

  “An almanac,” she said, trying the idea out to see if it sounded plausible. It did. A smile crept from her lips and started to spread across her face until it reached all the way up, casting a glint into her eyes. She looked down into her hand, suddenly aware of the item that she had been worrying while she worked.

  It was a tiny, rusted nail, four sided and irregular. The nail looked small and tired, as if it had been at work for a very long time. It had been spat out by the rotting doorjamb when she first jimmied open the front door of Granna’s house. Carrying the nail in her closed fist, she ventured out into the front yard.

  Evening was starting to gather under the vine drapery overhead, and Connie stood on tiptoe, naked toes gripping the mossy flagstone stoop. Under the wet moss, the stone felt cool and hard to her feet. She pushed aside the tendrils of wisteria over the door, its flowers grown dull and papery in the heat, and found the horseshoe dangling at a sharp angle. Connie regarded the wide burned circle on her front door.

  Dominus adjutor meus. Alpha. Omega. AGLA. She clenched her fist around the tiny nail, setting her jaw.

  “Why not,” Connie said aloud. Pushing the horseshoe into alignment with the rusted shadow in the house paint, she pressed the nail into the yielding wood with the ball of her thumb. Connie stepped back, folding her arms, and gazed up at the house, which stared back at her with something akin to approval.