Dark Alchemy (19 page)

A decomposing body hung suspended, feet not touching the ground. She could make out the glisten of moldering flesh over white teeth, the bottomless black of an eye socket. Something foul and viscous dripped from it to the floor.

And there were more. More than a dozen, dangling like rotting fruit. Bits of intestines protruded from abdominal cavities, rotting limbs attached to torsos only with bits of stretched-­out sinew. The remaining flesh was mottled green and black, bloated. Petra's heart hammered in her mouth.

The roots shifted with a rustle, reaching toward the mouth of the chamber, the way that sunflowers turn toward the sun.

Petra shrieked, and Sig growled.

Behind her, Petra heard the scrape and shuffle of footsteps. She backed up against the wall of the chamber and Sig crouched down before her, the hair on his back rising.

It was Gabriel. He strode into the chamber, carrying something. With horror, Petra realized that the bundle he held was a body: Jeff, bent and broken as he had hung from the tree. Gabriel himself looked inhuman: His eyes glowed in the darkness like fireflies.

His voice was soft and resigned, echoing oddly in the chamber. “I see you found the Lunaria.”

“What the hell is this?” Petra's voice was barely more than a whisper. It scraped her throat raw to speak around her fear.

“This is the secret of the Hanged Men.”

Gabriel lifted the body up to the roots, as if he were making an offering. The roots rustled down, gathered the body to them with what seemed like tenderness, and lifted it into that biomass of teeming light.

Petra struggled to understand. Images of John Wayne Gacy's basement surfaced in her mind. “These bodies . . .”

“Are the Hanged Men. Each one of us was hanged from this tree. The Alchemical Tree, the Lunaria. The marriage of heaven and earth. It's a remnant of one of Lascaris's old experiments. At one time, he worked the land, trying to work the alchemical processes on a larger scale.”

“Alchemical processes?” she echoed.

“How do you not know?” he asked her. “You wear the Green Lion devouring the sun.” He gestured at her neck.

Petra clutched her pendant. “It was my father's. He disappeared here, many years ago.”

“And you came to search for him?” Gabe's voice fairly dripped with skepticism.

“Yes. What does ‘the Green Lion devouring the sun' mean?” She tried to focus her mind on the puzzle, not the horror crowding around her.

“It signifies mercury dissolving gold—­the dissolution process. There are seven processes that the alchemist must accomplish in order to achieve a perfect transformation: calcination, dissolution, coagulation, sublimation, mortification, separation, and conjunction. This tree is frozen in the mortification stage. We all are.” He reached up and touched a root. It curled around his hand like a lover's caress.

“The Hanged Men are a product of a flawed and incomplete process. We cannot be transformed or restored to perfect, eternal life. Or even an imperfect mortal one. We are suspended in the mortification stage, what the old masters called the Black Raven or the Raven King—­the black, decaying stage of alchemy. All things that give rise to life must first decompose.”

“How long,” Petra squeaked. “How long have you been trapped?”

Gabe smiled, and it was a sad smile. “A very long time. I was the first to be hanged from the tree. The others came later.”

Petra's nails bit into her palms. “How long?” she demanded. “Is that really your picture in that mourning brooch?”

His eyes cast downward. “Yes. Since the spring of 1862.”

“But Sal nearly killed you.”

Something dark and murderous flitted across his face. “Wood. He used wood. The tree gives us life, and only a tree can take it away.”

“This is it?” she croaked, gesturing to the bodies. “This is the price of living forever?”

His mouth flattened. “Yes. We must return here, to the Lunaria. In its embrace, we decompose and are reborn again. Day after day, night after night. We can't go more than a ­couple of days without it. We can't wander very far from it. We're bound together, always in its shadow.”

“Is that . . . is that what's happening to Jeff?”

Gabe stared up at Jeff's body. The roots were busily winding around it, digging into the skin with a wet, sucking sound. Unbinding him. Remaking him. “The magic has drained out of the tree. Each successive generation of Hanged Men has been less . . . human.”

“They don't speak,” she said.

“Some can, and choose not to. Some can't. It's been more than a century since anyone dared . . .” Gabe closed his eyes. “ . . . since a Hanged Man was made. Sal will have made an even more terrible monster than we are, if Jeff survives.”

“Sal's in the hospital. He's going to be arrested,” she said numbly.

“I know. But he will be back.”

Petra looked down at her hands. She had intruded upon something intimate and sad. The fear drained out of her in the face of trying to understand this terrible curse, to apply some logic to it.

“I'm sorry,” she said, simply.

Gabe nodded. “I appreciate that. That sympathy. But you had no hand in it.”

She took a deep, quavering breath. What would he do, now that she had seen this? “Will you turn me into one of those ossified skeletons?”

Gabe blinked.

She said it with her chin lifted, steeling herself, standing before a train that was inevitably going to run her over.

“No,” he said quietly. “Those were not our doing. And I'm not a reasonless killer.”

She squinted at him. “But you moved the body on the ranch. You hid it.”

He inclined his head. “We did. Because we didn't want the police crawling around the ranch to find . . .” He sketched the Hanged Men with his hand.

“Oh. But what . . . what are they, then, if you didn't do it?” she asked.

“I'm not certain. I have theories.”

“Such as?”

“Initially, I thought it to be a result of one of Lascaris's old experiments. Some part of the calcination process reawakened.”

“Calcination,” she echoed.

“Calcination is the first alchemical process, the reducing of a material to bone to purify it. Once the material is calcined, it can be dissolved in the next stage. But this step of the process is flawed as I have seen it, in which the bone seems to react with overgrowth.” He stared up at the surface in frustration. “We've found three bodies here, on the ranch.”

Petra licked her lips. “Three?” She'd seen just the one, with the Jolly Roger watch.

“We found what we thought was a man and a woman together. Then a man.”

“Those must have been Cal's friends. Adam and Diana.” Her heart ached for the boy. He'd be alone.

“Cal and Adam and Diana are Stroud's ­people?”

“Yes.”

“Spies.” Gabriel narrowed his glowing eyes. “I always thought Stroud was a charlatan, incapable of anything substantial in the alchemy department. But I begin to wonder if he might have something to do with this runaway calcination process.”

“I found a body on Specimen Ridge,” Petra said slowly. “Like the one here. It has microscopic elements similar to petrified wood.”

Gabe frowned. “Interesting. Lascaris spent some time working on Specimen Ridge.”

“So . . . he used Specimen Ridge because of the calcined petrified remains there?”

Gabe shook his head. “No. His experiments
created
those petrified forests.”

Petra stared at him. “I don't believe you.”

Gabe laughed, a bitter sound that caused the tree roots to retract and writhe. “After all this, you don't believe me?”

“Let's just say that, even if I believe everything you've told me. About you. About the Hanged Men. About Lascaris. I still have a hard time believing that alchemy can affect geology on a grand scale.” She shuddered and looked up at the hanging shadows.

Gabe leaned forward on the balls of his feet. With his hands in his pockets, he looked a bit nervous. Hesitant. “What if I could prove it to you? Show you something truly amazing.”

“More amazing than this?” Petra lifted an eyebrow.

“More amazing than this. And beautiful.” He glanced up at the rotten fruit. “It smells better, too.”

“So . . . you're not going to kill me?”

Gabe shook his head. “No. This is the most conversation I've had in a hundred and fifty years. If I killed you, I'd have to talk to Sal.” He grimaced, and there was a dark glint of humor in his gaze.

Petra swallowed, gave a tentative smile. Her curiosity was devouring her fear. “Okay. Show me.”

 

Chapter Eighteen

The Marriage of Heaven and Earth

“A
lchemy is a strange art. It's horrible and beautiful at the same time.”

Petra followed Gabe down the tunnels that smelled like earth and metal, trailing her fingers along the walls. She could make out various layers of sediment. Parts of the tunnels looked as if they were man-­made, held up by haphazard stones and support beams. Other parts seemed entirely organic, as if a giant mole had dug a perfectly round and smooth pathway. Sig seemed most interested in those areas, sniffing vigorously.

“You seem to know a lot about it. Were you an alchemist?”

Gabe laughed and shook his head. “No. I was a Pinkerton agent.”

“No shit? You were . . . as a strikebreaker? Private security?” She blinked, dredging her memory for old history classes.

“Lascaris kept pulling gold out of thin air, and his investors were beginning to wonder how he accomplished it. And whether the secret could be reproduced.”

“Lucky you.”

“Luck had nothing to do with it. Pinkerton sent me to investigate Lascaris because I'd investigated other occult cases: phony fortune-­tellers, spontaneous human combustion, séances. I had an academic knowledge of alchemy and the supernatural, but not a practical one.”

“So . . . you were the nineteenth-­century version of the
X-­Files
?” Petra struggled to frame it in modern terms.

“I don't know what you mean.”

“Never mind.” Sal probably didn't invite the Hanged Men over to his house to watch television and eat popcorn. “The Pinkerton business . . . Is that . . . is that why you were hanged?”

“I was hanged because Lascaris caught me nosing around his house. The folks in Temperance didn't take kindly to anyone making accusations about their hero.” He rolled his glowing eyes.

“Lascaris was a hero?”

“Sure. He was the entire economy for the town.”

“Wow.” She stared up at the leak in the ceiling of the tunnel, drizzling rainwater. Sig paused to bite at the flow and slurp noisily. “Did Lascaris dig these?”

Gabriel's gleaming eyes bobbed ahead. “I think he made some of them, just to make it look like he was busy hunting for gold. The Hanged Men dug the more useful ones underneath the barn and one under Sal's house. We don't know about the rest. We suspect that the tree made some of them of its own volition.”

Petra was itching to get her hands on a sample of that tree, to look at it under the microscope. She was kicking herself for not breaking off a piece when she'd had the chance. “Does Sal know about the tunnels?”

Gabe shook his head. “Not really. He knows that we go to ground. But he has no idea about the extent of them, where they go, and how far they go.”

“That's convenient for you guys.”

“At times, it's ensured our very survival.”

“I imagine that it's difficult to remain in the same place for years on end. Never changing. Someone must have suspected, at some time?”

“Rarely.” Gabe shrugged. “The Rutherfords seized the Alchemical Tree from Lascaris's control. They have always had ranch hands, and we have been theirs, since that time. We're sort of like inherited farm equipment. Most ­people are ­people.”

“What does that mean?”

“Most ­people don't want to acknowledge any weirdness in their midst. The natural reaction is to go out of one's way to ignore it. It's a fairly easy reaction to exploit.”

“Still . . . no one in town notices that you don't age?”

Gabe glanced sidelong at her. “You were the first. We keep to ourselves, and most ­people pay no attention to us.”

“That must be terrible.” She couldn't imagine, living years on end, days without change, with no one acknowledging one's existence. It would be like being invisible.

“Eternity isn't very glamorous,” he admitted. “It's a lot of shoveling shit, watching the seasons turn. It's actually pretty boring.”

“I can't imagine a hundred and fifty years of cow shit.”

He chuckled, and the sound seemed to thaw some of the chill that radiated from him. “It
is
a lot of shit.”

“Do you miss it?”

“Do I miss what?”

Petra struggled to put what she wanted to in words. “Do you miss being alive? Do you miss the woman in the locket?”

He paused. “Not as much as I used to. I think that the . . . fervor . . . for life dims over time. Like I said, some of the Hanged Men are little more than automatons.”

“The ones that came later?”

“Yes. I doubt that they can do much more than tell the difference between day and night. When to go to ground, and when to wake. I wonder . . .” His amber gaze clouded, and his voice trailed off.

“You wonder?” she prompted.

“I wonder if, when the magic drains completely out of the tree, that's also my future.”

“Becoming an automaton?”

“Sometimes, I think that it would be a great relief. To no longer miss the life I once had. To no longer miss Jelena.”

“She was your wife?”

He nodded.

“She must have grieved for you.” Petra thought about his hair, carefully plaited in the brooch.

“She did. And I let her.”

“What do you mean?” Her brow wrinkled in puzzlement.

Petra thought she detected residue of old pain in his voice. “She came looking for me after I was hanged, with Pinkerton's men. But I hid.”

“Why?”

Gabe's mouth turned down. “I had no right to ask her to remain married to a corpse, to ask her to sleep alone while I rotted beneath the earth.”

“But if she loved you—­”

“Jelena was fragile.” Abruptly, he turned away. “And my vows were until death. We're not human. Not anymore. There's no use pretending.”

Petra stared at his back. “Seems awfully angsty to me.”

“You're a scientist.” The tunnel opened, and he paused to look over his shoulder. “But your scientist's mind might enjoy this.”

Petra stared into the soft, shining darkness.

“Oh, my God,” she breathed. “It's gorgeous.”

The tunnel opened into a massive cavern, covered in crystal. Crystal particulates crunched underfoot, growing along the walls and reaching up into the ceiling. The ceiling was pierced with a hole through which moonlight streamed, illuminating a black mirror of water at the bottom. The full moon's reflection shivered on the surface, split and shattered by water that dripped from the skylight above, as if the heavens met the earth here. The crystal picked up the soft glow, reflecting and refracting that light into the darkest corners of the cave. The chamber was mostly in shadow, but she could still make out Gabriel's silhouette amid the sparkle of the rock.

She knelt, picked up a handful of broken crystal on the ground. She studied it in the beam of her flashlight. Quartz in such quantities was geologically improbable for this locale. Still, she expected it to be quartz, but the crystals were shaped all wrong. Frowning, she licked her palm.

“It's potassium nitrate,” she said. “Saltpeter. But it's impossible for it to grow in such huge formations.”

“Lascaris made it,” Gabriel said. “Once upon a time, it was an old well. As near as I can suspect, he was working the conjunction process, trying to separate out elements. He called it his ‘star chamber'—­his
Camera Stellata
.”

Sig wandered to the edge of the water, snuffled at it. Petra skimmed her hand over the surface, and the salt stung her scraped palms.

Sig splashed into the pool, and she recoiled from the spray. He paddled out into the water, leaving slivers of moon reflection in his wake.

“At least I won't have to wash him,” she muttered. And the salt would probably kill off most of his fleas.

“The water. It's heavy. You can float on it.” Gabriel stood in the half darkness, eyes shining. This was the first thing she'd seen him take genuine pleasure in.

“Like the Dead Sea?” Petra let the soft water run through her fingers. It smelled like the ocean.

“Yes. So much of it's dissolved into the rainwater that it's become heavier than a body.”

“I want to try it.” She meant it, in a bold and reckless way that sat uneasily with her.

Gabriel grinned, his teeth white in the gloom. “I won't watch.”

Petra clicked her flashlight off. Only the moon was visible on the water, and its sparking reflection in the crystal, shifting as the water lapped at the bank.

She chose not to imagine if Gabriel had some kind of preternatural night vision. But she couldn't see the glow of his eyes, and assumed that they were either closed or he had his back turned. Petra had never been shy about nudity in the ser­vice of scientific inquiry, anyway.

At least, that's what she told herself.

She slipped out of her clothes and left them in the fine salt gravel at the edge of the pool. The salt prickled against her toes and stuck to the soles of her feet as she waded in. The black water slipped around her body, feeling luxuriously soft against her skin.

She sighed and leaned back, feeling the water lick her cheek. She floated with darkness all around her.

She'd felt this way sometimes on the rig at night, when she'd stood at the railing with Des, watching the gulls bob sleepily on the surface of the water. She'd failed to realize how fragile that sense of peace was. How fragile Des was.

She closed her eyes and let the water wash over her, rinse the tears from her face. She spread her fingers out and let her body sink up to her chin into the black. The water blotted out light and sound, life and feeling. So tempting. So tempting, to stay here, in the numb dark.

Gabriel's voice seemed to echo from the ceiling. She couldn't fix on his exact position. “It's amazing, isn't it?”

“It's just like the ocean.” She tried to clear the memory and the tears from her voice.

“Is that where you came from? You smelled like salt when I first met you.”

Petra's brow wrinkled, and she was suddenly self-­conscious. “Yes. I used to work on an oil rig.”

Sig paddled in a circle around her, splashing in the black. She reached out and grasped his tail. He snorted and swam out of her grip.

“Temperance is a long way from the ocean.”

Petra looked up at the moon. “I made a mistake that blew up an oil rig. Killed three ­people.” Somehow, in the darkness, it seemed easier to confess. “I loved one of them.”

She thought she heard a sigh in the black. “Love isn't forever.”

Petra stared up at the blurry moon. Of all ­people, he would understand that much. “No. It isn't.”

G
abe led Petra back through the warren of tunnels. She followed in silence, seeming to be mulling over all he'd told her.

And he was still unsure he'd done the right thing in telling her, but it was done.

Maybe he'd been too long underground, and human conversation was too much of a novelty. Maybe he was simply too old and numb and didn't care about keeping secrets anymore.

Or maybe it was the way that her hair smelled like salt as it dried.

Gabe rubbed his eyes. He'd been too long without companionship of any substantive type. Especially women. And he talked too much. As soon as he returned her to the surface, he was certain she'd bring back the federal agents. Sal would come back, burn the Lunaria, and that would be the end of things. A suitable ending, all things considered.

So maybe it didn't really matter much what he did, anyway. He'd had enough time, not done much with it. Maybe he should just let it all go.

He paused before a tunnel that split off in a fork. He pointed to the left. “That's the way back to the barn. I'll send someone to let you out.”

“You're not coming?”

He shook his head. “I need to check on Jeff.” He closed his eyes. “I need to see if he's going to survive.”

She laced her hands behind her back. “I want to come with you.”

He blinked at her. Hadn't she seen enough rotting flesh? He'd tried to soften that horror by showing her the Star Chamber, to show her that bit of his own secret wonder. But he had no desire to take her back to the Lunaria. “I don't think—­”

“I want to go,” she said firmly.

He shook his head. “If I have to put Jeff out of his misery, you don't want to see that.”

She swallowed. “Yeah. I do.”

She was entirely unlike Jelena. Though he knew better than to think that she felt anything else for him but the fascination of a scientist examining a bug at the end of a pin.

But she stood before him, freckled and disheveled with clothes streaked in mud . . . and utterly luminous. And for a moment, Gabe allowed himself to believe that she perhaps wanted something more from him than answers, than the unraveling of secrets and mysteries. He was more than a hundred and fifty years old. He deserved at least one illusion.

“All right,” he said, and turned right down the tunnel, back to the Lunaria.

Light filled the chamber, and Petra shielded her eyes from the glare with her hand. “Why is it so bright? Are they burning?”

“It's dawn. They're waking up.”

The golden glow sunk into the bodies, flowing from the roots. He could hear flesh fizzling, bones crackling, and the hiss of air in lungs. The bodies were suffused in cocoons of light that shone bright as a summer's day.

The Hanged Men dropped like angels from the ceiling, one by one, detaching themselves from that light source as delicately as dandelion fluff.

When the glow faded, they stood as whole and perfect as if they'd just been made, except for the terrible scars around their necks. They were nude. Clothes could not have survived that terrible rotting.

Petra looked away, a delicate flush spreading behind her freckles, as the Hanged Men hunted for bundles of clothes tucked away in the tree roots and stashed along the floor. Gabe's gaze roved among the roots, searching for Jeff.