“All I need is a pointy hat,” she remarked. He blinked.
The plan was simple. She had placed the charm under Sam’s pillow already. Now the recipe prescribed a short ritual that would draw the “malefactor”—she took that to mean whatever agent was making him sick, but the manuscript was ambiguous on that score—out of a person suffering from fits. She would conduct the ritual, and it should pull the illness out of Sam; the charm under his pillow would keep it from coming back in. She was prepared for the practice to hurt somewhat; with each successive experiment that she had conducted, either with the plants or the divination tools, she had felt a higher degree of pain the harder she worked. Connie placed her fingertips on the table and closed her eyes. Did Grace feel pain when she cleared the auras of her Santa Fe friends? Connie would have to ask her. A tiny smile pulled at her lips. The rational voice that dwelt in Connie’s most private core still balked at what she was about to do, but that voice had grown smaller in the past few weeks. Instead she focused her thoughts on Grace’s warm face, beaming her unshaken confidence in what Connie could do. And she thought about Sam.
She opened her eyes. “Okay then,” Connie announced to the empty room, and she pushed the sleeves of her turtleneck sweater up over her elbows. Running a finger down the manuscript page, she found her place in the text and began.
“To determine if a man’s mortal suffering be caused by bewitchment,” she read aloud, “catch his water in a witch-bottle and throw in some pins or nails and boil it upon a very hot fire.”
For the past few days Connie had been ruminating on the nature of this word bewitchment. The language of this strange work seemed slippery across the ages, with meanings shifting over time in the same way that the description of the book had changed according to who was doing the describing. Modernity took “bewitchment” to mean something caused by magical intervention. But early modern people lived in a world that largely predated science, operating without sophisticated understanding of the difference between correlation and causation. Connie had a suspicion that “bewitchment” might imply not magical causes per se, but only nonorganic ones. Poisoning, say, rather than common illness. Something attributable to an outside source, rather than to the mysterious workings of Providence. Just because a situation had a magical solution might not necessarily mean that it had a magical cause.
She took hold of the antique bottle, half full with Sam’s stolen urine, and released the stopper. Two or three pitted old pins were still inside, rusted in place, but she dropped in three brand-new silver eight-penny nails that she had purchased that week at the Marblehead hardware store. She added an open safety pin, a plastic-pearl-topped sewing pin that pricked her foot one morning in the bathroom, the still-threaded needle from within the grinning little corn husk doll on the mantel, a few new staples retrieved from the stapler in the Widener Library reference room, and an upholstery tack pried from the underside of a pew in the church where Sam was working on the day that he fell from the scaffold. Each addition tinked against the glass bottleneck, falling into the water with a hiss and releasing a faint but perceptible curl of smoke. Connie replaced the stopper, pausing to watch the water inside begin to simmer and boil, though the bottle was still standing on the table, away from any source of heat.
She then turned her attention to the fire, bending to stoke it again with the long poker. Connie added a few pinecones, which snapped and hissed, bursting immediately into flame and jostling the fire to burn hotter. The manuscript listed a long array of herbs and plants to be burned for “sure withdrawal.” In the past few days Connie had gathered as great a variety as she could from the garden and woods immediately surrounding the house, hanging them in the kitchen to dry. First she tossed in a dried bunch of thyme, rosemary, feverfew, sage, and mint, the aromatic herbs disintegrating in a fragrant blue puff of smoke, most of which tumbled upward to the chimney, but some of which spilled over the top lip of the hearth, drifting to the ceiling of the dining room. Her nose twitched, enjoying the sharp sensation of the oils in the herbs popping in the fire. Next Connie threw in a fragile bunch of flowering angelica, its lacy flowers desiccated and crumbling. The fire leapt to consume the dried flowers, and Connie’s shadow ducked and shimmied across the floor behind her as she worked, her face shining orange in the firelight.
Last, she reached for the Plymouth gentian, a tender pink blossom that was almost impossible to find, which she had discovered struggling for life along the slurried bank of the little water hole called Joe Brown’s pond, a few minutes’ walk from Milk Street. The flowers had wilted without really drying, and as she took them up they drooped in her hands. She pitched them into the fire, and to her surprise the fire spat forth a bright white orb that seemed to explode with an audible poof. Connie swallowed, nerves clawing at her belly, and forced herself to turn back to the manuscript.
“Throw the bottle into the fire whilst reciting the Lord’s Prayer followed by this most effective incantation,” she read, hands planted on her hips. “Okay,” she said, wondering if saying so aloud would push her fear away.
It didn’t.
“Okay,” she said again, grasping the bottle with a shaking hand and holding it up into the fading sunlight. The fluid inside was churning and bubbling, the sharp pins and nails swirling in a great angry froth. “Our Father,” she began, “Who art in Heaven. Hallowed be thy name.”
As she spoke, Connie turned, bringing the bottle nearer the fire. “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven.” The flames in the fire jumped, lapping higher against the hearth bricks, and Connie could feel the hot miasma rising out of the embers and pressing into the room. “Give us this day our daily bread,” she continued, squinting her eyes against the heat. “And forgive us our debts”—she chose the old, straightforward, Congregational wording—“as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation!” Her voice rose; she had never really listened to the words closely, but now the fire was growing fierce, its flames whitening, and she felt bizarrely as if she must be heard over the noise of its crackling. She held the bottle suspended over it with two singeing fingers, and blisters began to bubble forth. “But deliver us from evil! For Thine is the Kingdom! And the power!” At this a tongue of flame licked hungrily up toward the glass, meeting the bottom of the bottle. “And the glory! For ever and ever! Amen!”
She dropped the bottle. It spiraled, slowly, from her fingers down, down, down until it landed with an explosion of sparks, and the fire closed over it with a ferocious roar. Now she had the incantation to recite. Unsure what to do with her hands, Connie folded them at her chest in a prayerful attitude and bowed her head. The new blisters on the hand that had been holding the bottle felt tender and soft under the pressure of her fingers.
“Agla!” she said, and the fire spat in response, a thick column of white smoke beginning to billow out from the center of the burning logs. “Pater! Dominus!” With each word, the white smoke grew thicker until the chimney could not swallow it all and it began to spill forth from the hearth to the ceiling, crawling in waves across the rafters overhead before pouring through the open windows. “Tetragrammaton! Adonai! Heavenly Father I beseech thee, bring the evildoer unto me!”
As the last words escaped her lips, the white smoke seemed to condense into a tangible substance, or long-tailed creature, hurrying up out of the fire and skittering across the ceiling to escape through the windows. In that instant, with a rushing, gulping sound the fire tamped itself down. Connie opened her eyes to find the room suddenly calm, the smoke entirely vanished, the fire crackling and friendly.
She surveyed the room, hands still folded under her chin. There was the fire, burning politely. There was the bottle, blackened with smoke, nestled in the embers. There was the dining table, still holding the manuscript and an unused assortment of herbs and plants. Her eyes traveled over every surface in the room, wondering if she had just imagined it all—the smoke, the noise, the leaping flames.
“Is that it
?” she asked the empty room. Arlo was nowhere to be seen. She looked under the table and found him there, huddled in a little ball the color of night, watching her with worried eyes. “I think you can come out,” she whispered, beckoning to him. “It’s over.” He refused to move. Connie stood back up, frowning. Something was not right. The house felt suspended, alert. She waited, unsure what to do next.
As she stood by the table, fingertips resting on the tabletop, eyes wide, she heard a rumbling in the distance, like a heavy truck rolling over a wooden bridge, only the sound seemed to be drawing nearer. In the time it took for her to begin to move around the table and make her way to the nearest window, the sound built and grew, sending tremors through the ground under her feet, bending and rocking the wide pine floorboards. Connie fell to her knees, the shaking moving into the walls of the house, clattering the crockery in the dining room alcove and swaying the hanging spider plants in wide, jerky arcs. She crawled under the table, floor thumping and vibrating under her hands and knees. From the kitchen she heard the sound of a jar exploding across the linoleum floor. She reached Arlo, wrapping her arms around his small body just as the rumbling stopped with a single great whump, the sound of the front door flying open. Connie extended her head out from under the table, mouth flopping open in surprise.
There, adjusting his club tie, stood Manning Chilton. She backed away on her knees under the table, getting to her feet as she heard him start to chortle.
“Gracious, my girl,” he boomed from the front door, stepping into the house. “And I thought you were exaggerating. This is a wretched hovel, indeed.”
Her stomach contracted in fear, but a little voice in the back of her mind reminded her about the burned symbol on the door. Better to be on your own turf, she heard Grace say, voice knowing. Nobody wants to keep you safe more than I do. Connie straightened, face contorted in confusion.
“What,” she stammered, confused. “What are you doing here?” She cast one eye back down to the recipe, double-checking the words. “Bring the evildoer unto me” the incantation said. And then she saw that she had overlooked a last line. When his Water is well Boilt so shall the Sorcerer be drawn unto the fyre, the manuscript promised. And so with pins and crafte may he be entreated to free his Victim from his Diabolicall machinations. Refer to receipts for Death-philtres to ascertain other means. Then the page supplied the long list of herbs for sure withdrawal. At the very bottom of the page, in faded script such that she had not noticed it before, was written Cont’d.
Connie glanced quickly up at her advisor, who was approaching with a thin smile attached to his face. “I’ve been meaning to drop by for some time,” he remarked, voice jovial. “I believe that you have something for me, do you not?” He looked bemused, as if a theory he had long held had just been proven correct.
“How,” she began, swallowing when she found her throat sticky and dry. “How did you get here?”
He chuckled, drawing nearer. “Why, in a car, of course.”
Connie had read several historical accounts of the witch-bottle technique, all of which were ambiguous in their depictions of what would happen. She had thought that it would draw the illness—the malefactor—out of Sam, perhaps into the bottle in the fire. But now she saw that the instructions could be read another way. It could be seen to draw the agent responsible for the illness to the fire. Chilton might have thought he was stopping by of his own volition, but the realization began to dawn on Connie that, in fact, his appearance was the result of the work she had just done. Her mouth fell open, horrified.
He bent to inspect one of the shield-back chairs that Connie had pushed to the side of the room. “Eighteenth-century. Marvelous,” he said to no one in particular. Reaching a long finger forward, he brushed a fingernail against the patterned splat. “Inlaid,” he confirmed to himself. He straightened, looking again at her. “Yes. Well, in truth I was spending the afternoon working away on some compounds in my office. And then, rather abruptly, it occurred to me that I might come see you.” He smiled again, his mouth devoid of humor. “I hope that the quicksilver doesn’t boil over. Imagine how I shall explain an office chemical fire at the next history department meeting.”
“I was…” Connie began, her mind attempting to skip ahead of her tongue. But why would the witch-bottle spell have summoned him?
She watched her advisor poking through her grandmother’s dining room with detached interest, saying, “So this is the old bird’s house that you’ve been so bothered with,” and rejected the obvious conclusion as impossible. Chilton was a distinguished, ambitious old academic. He wrote books, he delivered lectures, he smoked a pipe, for God’s sake. He was concerned with truth, he said, with reputation. He was ambitious, yes, and single-minded in his desire. But he was no poisoner.
The logical voice that Connie had pushed away now screamed at her in her mind. Alchemy! Compounds! Chilton was desperate to get ahold of the physick book to further his own alchemical research. He had tried to prod her using praise and the promise of professional success. Then he had tried dogging her as she hunted for the book in the Harvard library.
Connie stared at her advisor, her eyes growing wider as the logical chain began to form in her mind. Chilton wanted the book for himself. He had to force her to find it for him. And if he knew what the book was used for, then what better motivation could he supply?
Connie’s hand flew to the manuscript, horror dawning across her face. “It was you,” she said, voice hollow as she realized that Chilton had been willing to risk Sam’s very life in service to his ambition. “You’re the one.”
“Hmmm,” Chilton said, inspecting the portrait hanging on the far wall of the dining room, of the broad-foreheaded, wasp-waisted young woman, a small dog just now visible in the shadow under her arm. “Did you know, Miss Goodwin, that ancient Arabian alchemists believed in the doctrine of the two principles? Would you happen to know what those two principles were?”
He looked over his shoulder at her, expectantly. She stared at him, un-comprehending, sick with revulsion.
“No? All metals, they thought, consisted of different proportions of mercury, to correspond to the moon, and sulfur, for the sun. Mercury bears the essential metallic property—or quicksilver, I should say, as Mercury is actually its planetary name—while sulfur provides the combustibility. They weren’t referring quite literally to quicksilver and common sulfur, of course, but to the metaphorical qualities of each. The aesthetics of substance.” He cocked an eyebrow. “Great ones for metaphor, the alchemists,” he added, circling around the dining table, past the portrait. Connie moved around the opposite side of the table, gathering the manuscript to her chest, balled fists clutching handfuls of herbs that had been lying on the table.
“To these two fundamental elements that make up all metals, a distinguished man named Paracelsus added a third: salt, which he thought accounted for…” Chilton seemed to grope for the correct word.
“Earthiness,” he finished. “Fixity. Groundedness. So, metal, fire, and earth. The three fundamental elements which, in pure form, are the building blocks of all reality. The original alchemical recipe for gold brought together the very purest forms of mercury and sulfur: the liquid—metallic, the difficult to contain—together with the explosive—the yellowish, the stuff of demons. And salt, for stability. For tangibility, even wholesomeness. One might also think of these three elemental forms as representative of the spirit”—he ticked off each on a finger—“the soul, and the body. Like many folkloric, magical, even”—here he arched an eyebrow meaningfully at Connie—“religious systems, the alchemists put great stock in multiples of three. Naturally, the central problem facing the alchemists was one of purity. How to refine a substance into its purest—its best—most elemental form.”
A wicked smile spread across his face as he continued. “Of course, when added in the correct proportion to a supply of drinking water, say, the effects of these basic elements on all three aspects of a man’s person can be qui
te…pronounced. Even lethal. Particularly antimony. Its alchemical symbol is an orb with a cross on top of it—the same symbol used to denote royalty. The circle at the center of the glyph for the philosopher’s stone. And”—he chuckled—“a rather close relative of arsenic.”
Connie thought back to Sam’s description of the water in his cooler at the church, how it had had a metallic taste. She remembered that no one seemed to know who had called the ambulance that day. And then she saw Sam falling, his leg shattering against the hard back of the wooden pew, heard the wet crunch of his body crushed by gravity, and her vision clouded with red.
“Why?” she demanded, her voice growing stronger. “Why would you harm him? I nearly had the book. I was going to give it to you.”
“Ah,” Chilton said, his hand roaming over an earthenware teapot. He lifted it up to the thin light in the window, flared his nostrils with disapproval, and set it down again. Then he gestured to the book that she was grasping to herself. “As a matter of fact, you apparently have the book. And I don’t recall being informed.”
He watched her, but she said nothing. Chilton turned to gaze out the window over the garden, his hands folded behind his back. When his eyes were averted she quickly began to shred the herbs she held in her hands, ripping the stems and leaves apart.
“I did try to encourage you,” he said, his back still to her. “I told you what an important find it would be for your own work. I even”—his voice took on a wounded cast, as if he could not bear the disappointment that she had brought upon him—“invited you to let me present you to my colleagues at the Colonial Association. To share in my triumph. I have been grooming you, my girl. At great sacrifice to my own busy schedule, it must be said. Preparing you to rise to the very top of your field, under my tutelage.” He heaved a woeful sigh. “The conference, alas, is at the end of the month. And you have brought me nothing.”
The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane Page 35