The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane

by Katherine Howe

  While he spoke, Connie closed her eyes, recalling the instructions that had been written on the page in the manuscript. The text read:

  When the Sorcerer appeareth, hee may be implor’d to reverse the malefaction by divers means. 1. Ref. death-philtres, pages 119–137,

  I can’t do that. Connie thought. I can’t kill him! Her hands scrabbled through the herbs that were scattered across the tabletop, sifting the dead leaves through her fingers. I don’t know what to do! her inner voice whimpered, but she locked it away in a disused corner of her mind and concentrated on the work. A growl rumbled from under the table.

  2. Simple reversal, whereby the bottel its contents be placed in a pot upon the fyre within not more than three feet of said Malefactor combined with stinging Nettle and ground roots of Mandrake altogether to bring his bewitchment back unto him, and 3. if lessen’d effect be desired withal do the same adding Goldenseal and mint whilst reciting the Most effective Incantation.

  Connie opened her eyes and saw that Chilton was still gazing out of the dining room window, shaking his head and tsking.

  “A shame,” he was saying. “I had had such high hopes. As you have probably gathered, I am on the point of achieving the one true recipe for the philosopher’s stone. A discovery that mankind has been awaiting for thousands of years.” His hand rested again on the earthenware teapot, tightening its grip. “In point of fact, I have already promised to sell the rights to the formula, and for not a small sum, either. The philosopher’s stone is not only real, but likely an ancient name for an arcane arrangement of carbon atoms, able to bring purity to any disordered molecular system in everything from physics to biochemistry. All the metaphors and riddles in the alchemical texts suggested it. Valueless, and all around us! Unknown, and yet known to all. Carbon is the basis of all life on earth, after all. In varying degrees of purity and arrangement, it assembles into coal, diamond, even the human body. It is like God’s Tinkertoy.” The hand wrapped around the teapot squeezed, and a crack suddenly shot through the pot’s side with a snap.

  His laughter stopped abruptly as an image assembled itself before Connie’s eyes, of Chilton sitting at his desk in the Harvard history department, his ear pressed to a telephone receiver, his face purpling as a male voice said, Well, of course I was interested, but you didn’t really expect me to take it to the board, did you? The voice broke into gasps of laughter as Chilton’s upper lip quavered, and a pencil clutched in his fist snapped in two as he uttered, I just need a little more time, dammit! Through the telephone the laughing voice said, Face it, Manny. You’ve got nothing for me, just as the image pulled apart like oiled tissue and Connie found herself back in her grandmother’s hall.

  Chilton continued steadily. “I plan to reveal the formula at the Colonial Association, bringing history and science together at last. And then I can finally stop being little more than a glorified schoolteacher.” He spat out this last word with surprising venom. “But unfortunately, a crucial element is missing. One that I am unable to define. A process, I am reasonably sure. A final step.” His eyes met hers, and she saw in his face the dark, dull throb of desperation.

  “Let us say that I, too, needed to broaden my source base,” Chilton continued, voice growing cold. “Of course I knew you were a top-notch researcher; that’s why I admitted you to the program in the first place. But when you told me of this extant shadow book, well…” His lips drew back, bloodless and frigid. “You do surprise me, my girl. References to an original colonial-era shadow book, used by an actual witch, and the first clue found in your blessed old grandmother’s house, no less! I knew then that you would be of even greater use to me than I had anticipated.” He started to approach the table. The growling grew louder.

  Connie held his gaze, her fingers surreptitiously tearing a corner off of the mandrake root and ripping it to shreds. She did not speak. A flicker of tension twitched in her cheek. She watched him approach, her hands moving automatically through their preparations, as if they had always known what to do, leaving her consciousness free to contemplate how loathsome her advisor had become to her, how his ego and hunger for prestige had made him twisted and debased, how behind his eyes she saw a soul whose very humanity had been squashed under the impossible weight of his ambition.

  “As you know, I place no faith in innate talent, Miss Goodwin,” Chilton said, his voice morphing into a snarl as he drew even closer, his hand tracing the shield back of one of the chairs tucked under the dining table.

  “One cannot go skipping about, expecting one’s romantic inclinations to lead the way. No. The cornerstone of the best practice of history is effort. It is work! I had to devise a way to hasten your research, as my own meager encouragements were proving insufficient.” He paused. “At the same time, I could also ascertain if the shadow book was as powerful as I believed. A little alchemical compound in the body can confound modern medicine, but it should be no match for a true premodern physick book, particularly in the hands of a motivated querent.” His eyes began to gleam. “After I observed you one afternoon in the, ah, shall we say affectionate company of a young man, why, the idea naturally presented itself.

  “And I was right,” he exclaimed, surging toward Connie. He lunged for the book that she held in her arms, grabbing ahold of her shoulders. “Give it to me,” he growled, fingers digging painfully into her flesh, his sour breath hot on her face. She screamed, twisting herself in his grip, struggling to free herself, but his weight crushed down on her, one gnarled hand prying for the book.

  All at once a blurred form leapt out from under the table, enfolding Chilton’s arm in a snarling flurry. Chilton cried out in pain, dropping to his knees in an attempt to disengage his forearm from the tearing, jerking grip of the dog, who held fast to the flesh, as if killing a rat. As Chilton fell, Connie lunged forward, plunging her hand straight into the crackling fire to grasp the antique bottle. Its glass was so fearsomely hot it almost felt soft to the touch, her fingertips sinking into the searing gel as she lifted it from within the flames and dropped it into the waiting cauldron. It carried away a charred layer of skin from Connie’s fingers, coils of smoke drifting up from her hands as she squinted her eyes against the overweening consciousness of pain.

  She lurched back to the end of the table, grasping the shredded heap of mandrake root in one raw and bleeding hand, skin sizzling at the touch of the deadly root, and flinging it toward the cauldron, where it fell with a sinister hiss, releasing a puff of oily black smoke. Meanwhile Chilton hoisted himself up with a grunt, leaning on the table. His foot shot out and connected with the dog, who let out an angry yelp as he went skidding across the floor before vanishing in the instant before he would have struck the opposite wall.

  “I want it,” Chilton commanded through gritted teeth. “Give it to me. I must have it!” The sleeve of his tweed jacket and oxford shirt hung in red ribbons from the elbow, and he staggered to his feet, wrapping the trailing rags of clothing around the ripped, oozing gashes that crisscrossed his arm. He crept nearer, loops of blood falling from the shredded arm that he now held clutched to his chest.

  With a quick movement, Connie pushed through the crumbled leaves and herbs on the table, her grasp moving automatically to a few stalks of stringy white flowers with broad, rough-textured leaves holding hard, waxy berries—the goldenseal. She took it up together with the nettles and crushed the stalks and flowers in her palms, naked skin screaming against the pain, and dropped them into the pot. Beneath the cauldron, the fire dodged and shimmied, flinging her and Chilton’s shadows crazily about the room.

  “It won’t work for you!” Connie screamed, clutching the manuscript to herself and stepping back.

  “It will! I will make it work!” he bellowed, and he reached out again with a stagger, clawing at her forearm. “It has to work! The philosopher’s stone is the conduit! It is the medium for God’s power here on earth! The rock on which God’s church is built!”

  She wrenched away from his grip, edging n
earer the hearth.

  “No,” she said, her voice grave. “It’s not for you. I won’t let you have it.”

  And then she turned, her heart contracting, and opened her arms, casting the manuscript into the fire.

  Surprise broke across Chilton’s face, dissolving quickly into dismay and then anger as a cry worked its way through all the layers of restraint that he had acquired in his sixty-odd years—layers applied first in the echoing hallways of the Back Bay town house where he idly loitered, book in hand, overlooked; then in his Gold Coast dormitory at Harvard, as he pulled a silver-backed hairbrush through locks that simply refused to lie along his scalp; next at his club, as he tried to master his grip on his pipe; layers waxed in the secret hallways of the Faculty Club and buffed in the faculty meetings as he watched anxiously for the inevitable discovery that his work, his life’s work, would fail. Layers that now peeled away, revealing in Chilton’s eyes the naked certainty that his deepest fear was true, that all the prestige that had been laid at his feet and burnished, carefully, over the years of his life could never suffice, could never mask the fact that he was a weak man, Manning Chilton was, a trembling and grasping little man, and that no alchemical transformation could be wrought on his soul to make him into the great scholar—into the great person—that he yearned to be.

  Chilton fell to his knees in anguish, scrabbling at the glaring embers of the fire, reaching and darting his fingers in to retrieve the manuscript leaves that were already starting to curl and blacken at their edges.

  Connie watched him fall, kneeling by the cauldron, which had started to bubble and steam, and she began to recite the Lord’s Prayer in a whisper. Her heart filled with pity; she hated to see this man, her once-esteemed mentor, reduced to a cowering, clutching, horrid animal. In his own desire for truth, for the wealth, prestige, and promise that the philosopher’s stone offered, he had traded away his humanity, leaving little more than a shattered void. The stone was everything that he wanted, and could never have.

  She reached down to the floor, picking up the sprig of dried mint that, when added to the brew in the pot, would finally pull the sickness out of Sam. She dropped it into the cauldron, and as she did so, the fire burst forth with a smattering of bluish sparks, and Chilton pulled his burned hands away with a wail. For another moment Connie gazed on him, and then, steeling herself, she completed the incantation.

  “Agla,” she said softly, and the thick white smoke began to congeal in a column in the center of the fire. “Pater, Dominus,” she continued, as the dense smoke wrapped its arms around the steaming cauldron. “Tetragrammaton, Adonai. Heavenly Father I beseech thee, bring the evildoer unto he,” she finished in a whisper. The white smoke bent in a sinuous arc from around the cauldron, reaching into Chilton’s mouth, eyes, and ears, and seeming to flow into his body. His eyes became obscured by smoke, and he stayed kneeling, immobile for an instant before the smoke pulled back out of his body, emptying from his mouth and billowing in reverse back into the belly of the fire. He bent forward, hacking and coughing, his arms clutching at his midsection, a long shuddering cry wrenching forth from a dark, secret part of himself.

  All at once Connie felt the strength drain out of her legs, and she slid to the floor. Leaning her head against the leg of the table she rested, cradling her badly singed hands in her lap. The burns felt scraped and raw, and as she flexed her fingers, the nerves in her skin tore and spat. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the thin yellow mandrake venom bubble up out of the burns in her hands and lift in invisible droplets into the air, vanishing, pushed up out of her skin.

  For a while she leaned there, watching the now tame fire crackling as Chilton wept silently into the hands pressed over his face. Then, after a few minutes, a gurgling tremor gripped his midsection and throat, and his limbs suddenly stiffened as the first seizure tore through his body, rolling his eyes backward in his head and knotting his muscles in contortions that were horrifying to behold.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered, one tear trickling down her cheek as Arlo materialized by her side.

  POSTLUDE

  Cambridge, Massachusetts Late October 1991

  A FIRE BURNED MERRILY IN THE BRICK HEARTH AT THE REAR OF ABNER’S Pub, and as Connie arrived in the doorway, she smiled. As usual, someone—maybe even Abner himself—had gone overboard with baby pumpkins, heaping little pyramids of them at the center of every table, together with paper cups full of markers and paint pens for the addition of wicked, toothy faces. At the bar, a woozy undergraduate sat wearing a cocktail dress and clip-on mouse ears, jabbing her finger into the chest of a young man in formal dress, his bow tie and cummerbund speckled with snarling pigs. “No, you lissen,” the girl was slurring, and Connie laughed.

  “Halloween is the same here every year,” she tossed over her shoulder at Sam, who had appeared behind her.

  “Isn’t that what you like about it?” he replied, edging past her, carrying a duffel bag. She grinned.

  Connie spotted a hand thrust above the heads in the bar, flapping at her, and she and Sam picked their way through the throng to the booth near the back. It proved to belong to Liz, who rose from her seat to enfold Connie in an enthusiastic hug. “There she is!” cried Liz, squeezing her briefly before turning to hug Sam.

  “Thank God you’re back,” said Thomas, shaking his head. “I am totally not prepared to answer these essay questions. Do you realize that grad school applications ask you to write an intellectual biography? What does that even mean?” Liz prodded a sharp elbow into his ribs. “Ow!” he cried. “What?”

  Connie dropped her shoulder bag, still stuffed with books and dirty clothing, on the floor and settled into a vacant chair with a sigh.

  “So. How was the conference?” Janine Silva asked, nodding greetings at Sam.

  Connie smiled out of the corner of her mouth. “Pretty good, I guess,” she said as Sam broke in. “C’mon! Tell them what happened.”

  “It’s not a big deal,” she demurred, gratefully accepting the old-fashioned that a waitress had deposited on a coaster in front of her.

  “What isn’t?” asked Liz through Sam’s insisting “It is so!”

  Everyone at the table watched with expectant eyes as Connie delicately sipped at the brimming cocktail glass, her eyes closed. When she opened them, everyone was still waiting.

  “Cambridge University Press said they want to see a copy of my dissertation when it’s done,” she admitted, and the table vibrated with appreciative whoops.

  “I knew it,” Janine Silva said, shaking her head. “Do you have a title yet?”

  Connie nodded, reaching for her notes. “‘Rehabilitating the Cunning Woman in Colonial North America: The Case of Deliverance Dane,’” she recited from the page. Liz and Thomas chinked their glasses together. Janine smiled with approval.

  “A little wordy,” her new advisor cautioned, “but there’s still time to revise it.”

  “So the paper went over well, is what you’re saying,” Liz said. “I wasn’t sure the Colonial Association was ready for a feminist reconception of vernacular magic.”

  “I wasn’t sure either,” Connie said, “but apparently they are.”

  “How are you liking chairing the department, Professor Silva?” Liz asked, with a pointed look at Thomas, indicating that he had put her up to asking the question. He blushed, and Connie felt a wave of protective affection for him. Being in proximity to professors always made his hands clammy.

  Janine shrugged. “Well, I’ll tell you,” she said, sipping at her beer, “it’s a lot of work. It was a real shock, having to step in right at the beginning of the semester like that.” She paused, looking down with a shake of her head. “What a shame, what happened to Manning.”

  “What did happen?” asked Sam, accepting his own drink from the waitress.

  “He fell ill,” she said, eyebrows rising. “Nobody really knew what it was at first, but then when they opened his office to get me the departmental files, they found all k
inds of crazy heating elements and compounds in there. Heavy metals. Toxic stuff.” She sighed, looking down into her glass. “It looks like he started out by dabbling in some of those old alchemy textbooks that he had kicking around, you know, just to see what would happen. But now they think that he must have poisoned himself. Gradually, over several months or years. Frankly,” she said, voice growing serious, “it would account for some of his odd behavior over the past year. He was always an eccentric guy, of course, but lately…” She sighed again. “Such a pity. He used to do such good work.”

  “He can’t teach anymore?” asked Thomas, looking crushed. Connie knew that Thomas had counted on working with Chilton in the coming year.

  “He’s on indefinite leave,” Janine said. “Apparently, he has some extensive neurological damage from the exposure. Causes him to have grand mal seizures, almost two a week!” She took a sip of her beer, shaking her head. “Can you imagine? At his age.” Sam glanced over at Connie, who avoided his gaze.

  “At any rate,” Janine continued, “the university didn’t think he could maintain a steady teaching schedule, much less chair the department. There’s talk of giving him emeritus status if his health should stabilize. But they’re not certain that it will. Speaking of which, how are you doing, Sam? Connie told me that you had kind of a rough summer.”

  “I did, just for a little while,” Sam said, looking down at his hands. “Fell from a scaffolding at a restoration job. Really messed up my leg. They think I may have clocked myself on the head, too, and that’s what really worried everyone. Especially my parents. But one day last month it all just sorted itself out.” He eyed Connie. She smiled at him.