‘Listen carefully,’ Ghoolion said as he worked on the fire beneath the cauldron with a pair of bellows. ‘I’m going to teach you a few basic facts about alchemy.’
‘A few basic facts?’ Echo replied with a touch of disappointment. ‘“Secrets which even the most experienced alchemist would give his eye teeth to know” - that was what you said!’
‘You can’t measure the universe without learning your two-times table first,’ Ghoolion retorted over a clap of thunder. ‘You can’t write a novel without mastering the alphabet or compose a symphony without being able to read a score. How can I tell you about Prima Zateria if you don’t even know how to cook a ghost?’
Echo pricked up his ears. ‘Is that what we’re going to do, cook a ghost?’
‘Possibly, we’ll see. Maybe, maybe not. It doesn’t work every time. Alchemy is a science, but not, alas, an exact one. It’s as close to an art as any science can be and not every work of art succeeds.’
Echo’s curiosity was aroused. Coming closer, he wound round Ghoolion’s legs.
‘Actually,’ Ghoolion went on, ‘this isn’t a work of art. It’s just a trick, a kind of joke.’
‘I thought you didn’t make jokes.’
‘Who says so?’ Ghoolion looked down at the Crat in surprise.
‘You did.’
‘I did? Really? The things one says without thinking … I’ve always been fond of jokes.’
‘Is that a fact?’ Echo said warily. ‘When was the last time you cracked one?’
Ghoolion thought for a moment. ‘The last time? Let’s see. It was, er … er …’
‘Well?’
‘It was …’ Ghoolion was clearly racking his brains. ‘It was … Good heavens, it was when I was a student!’
For the first time, Echo detected something in Ghoolion’s expression that wasn’t born of a cold heart or iron self-control: a look of genuine dismay. However, it disappeared as quickly as it had come, to be replaced by his habitual mask of authority and grim determination.
‘Well?’ he snarled suddenly. ‘Shall I cook us a ghost or not?’
Echo recoiled. Ghoolion’s tone was as sharp as a sword thrust.
‘Please do,’ he said in a subdued voice.
The Alchemaster laid the bellows aside and drew his cloak around him. ‘Alchemists have always engaged in a variety of ludicrous attempts to transform one substance into another,’ he said. ‘Lead into gold, blood into wine, wine into blood, wood into bread, bread into diamonds. It used to be considered quite professional for an alchemist to sprinkle a stone with magnetised quicksilver when the moon was full and hope that it would turn into marzipan.’
‘But lead into gold - that works, doesn’t it?’ Echo asked diffidently. He had heard of such a feat at some stage.
Ghoolion sighed. ‘I can see that, alchemistically speaking, your state of knowledge is that of a medieval village idiot. I shall have to begin at rock bottom.’
The little Crat gave another start, but not at a thunderclap this time. The Alchemaster could be really hurtful at times. He moved away, looking offended.
‘Gold and lead!’ Ghoolion said scornfully. ‘Those early alchemists tried to transform two of the densest substances on our planet.’
Echo had crept behind an untidy stack of battered old books.
‘Well?’ he called from his hiding place. ‘Why not?’
‘The denser the substance, the less susceptible it is of transformation,’ Ghoolion replied. ‘You might as well try to teach a brick to fly. Volatile substances are our only chance - any well-informed alchemist will tell you that.’
Ghoolion uncorked a glass bottle containing a reddish liquid, thereby releasing a tiny cloud of pink vapour. Echo could have sworn the vapour giggled as it dispersed. His curiosity rearoused, he emerged from his hiding place.
Ghoolion was now standing in front of an oil painting, a most impressive representation of a volcanic eruption.
‘The years of study I’ve devoted to painting disasters have taught me an important lesson,’ he said, engrossed in the picture. ‘No one who has observed how systematically a fire incinerates a town, how methodically a volcano buries a village in lava, how deliberately a tornado ravages an island, or how murderously a tsunami inundates a whole stretch of coastline and all its inhabitants, can believe that those natural forces act blindly. They
think
- they’re rational beings like you and me!’
As if to confirm this audacious theory, there was a blinding flash outside, followed almost immediately by a peal of thunder.
Echo flinched. ‘But a thunderbolt like that one can’t have anything very nice in mind.’
‘Of course not,’ Ghoolion said brusquely. ‘Elemental forces think elemental, violent thoughts. Destruction is their purpose in life, their function, their destiny. They cleanse the earth of inessentials without compunction, without wasting an ounce of their strength on mercy or compassion. They think big.’ The Alchemaster continued to gaze at the painting. ‘But the crucial question is,’ he went on, ‘how do their thoughts manifest themselves?’
Echo strove to picture the thoughts of a forest fire, but his powers of imagination were insufficient. All he could visualise were billowing flames and charred trees.
‘Where there’s fire there’s smoke,’ said Ghoolion. ‘Once you’ve managed to conceive of smoke as the cogitations of fire, the stench of sulphur as a volcano’s nightmare and steam as the ideas of a geyser, you soon come to realise that the whole earth is a living, thinking being.’
Echo didn’t like the turn the conversation was taking, nor did he care for Ghoolion’s increasingly ominous tone of voice. Another flash of lightning lit up the laboratory and an ear-splitting peal of thunder set all its glass vessels rattling.
‘If the earth is a living, thinking being,’ said Ghoolion, raising his voice to make himself heard above the tempest raging outside, ‘I should be able to find a way to read its mind. To read and decipher its thoughts and ultimately, even, to influence them!’
A violent gust of wind blew into the laboratory, causing the Anguish Candles to flicker wildly and utter moans expressive of their hopes of being extinguished. Memorandum sheets went fluttering through the air and animal skeletons tinkled like xylophones. Then the wind dropped. The Anguish Candles stopped flickering and resumed their customary lamentations.
‘Yes!’ cried Ghoolion. ‘Then I could take a hand in the process of creation - in Nature’s everlasting creative activities, which are forever bringing forth new life!’
Half a dozen thunderbolts exploded simultaneously, all round the tower. They lit up the laboratory as bright as day, projecting multiple versions of the Alchemaster’s shadow on the walls. Startled, Echo dived under a stool. He waited anxiously for the thunder to die away, then asked in a tremulous voice: ‘When are we going to do our trick, Master?’
Ghoolion stared at him vaguely, like someone suffering from memory loss and trying to recall the name of the person addressing him.
‘Hm?’ he said. He peered into the massive cauldron. ‘The ghost brew is hot enough,’ he muttered. ‘The electrification of the atmosphere and the extreme humidity shouldn’t be detrimental to the success of the experiment - conditions are positively ideal, in fact. Good, let’s begin. I’m going to cook a ghost. Will you assist me?’
‘Only if I don’t have to eat it!’ Echo replied.
Ghoolion laughed hoarsely. ‘Don’t worry. We can start right away. Everything is in readiness.’
He went over to an iron cabinet and opened it. A dense cloud of icy vapour flowed out, almost concealing him from view as he rummaged around inside. At length he brought out two balls of fat and held them up to the candlelight.
‘Graveyard Gas and Murkholm Mist,’ he said. ‘That’s all we need. This is going to be a very simple ghost.’
He closed the cabinet, strode back to the cauldron and tossed one of the balls into the seething liquid. As it melted, Echo heard a high-pitched, long-drawn-out sigh that almost froze his blood.
‘That was some gas from the Graveyard Marshes near Dullsgard,’ Ghoolion explained. ‘It doesn’t matter much what former living creature it belonged to. It’s dead, that’s the main thing.’
Echo plucked up his courage and leapt on to a table for a better view of what was happening inside the cauldron.
Ghoolion tossed the second ball into the brew. As the fat melted, a tiny white snake wriggled out of it, swam around on the seething surface for a while and then submerged.
‘That was a sample of Murkholm Mist. Incredible, the treatment that semi-organic substance can stand. You can boil it in water, even in molten lead or hydrochloric acid. You can put it in the alchemical furnace and subject it to extreme temperatures. You can encase it in ice for a year, marinate it in mercury, shut it up in a vacuum, batter it with a sledgehammer. None of those things will affect it. But watch …’
Ghoolion produced a flute from his cloak. Then he put it to his lips and proceeded to play a simple, melodious tune that sounded like the setting to a nursery rhyme. The vaporous white snake surfaced once more, writhing like a worm on a hook. Ghoolion stopped playing.
‘Music. Music drives it insane,’ he said. ‘It can’t endure music, however beautiful, except trombophone music. You see? It’s dying. It’s committing suicide by dissolving in the water. Now it’s combining with the Graveyard Gas. That’s the second stage.’
Echo watched in fascination as the vaporous snake sank beneath the surface of the brew and dissolved. Hearing a noise, he looked over at the Leyden Manikins. For some reason they had started to rampage around inside their jars and hammer on the glass sides. Ghoolion paid no attention. Reaching into the pocket of his cloak, he brought out some black powder and tossed it into the cauldron. The liquid reacted in a surprising manner. It turned green, then red, then purple and finally green again.
‘The desiccated dung of Time-Snails,’ said Ghoolion, as casually as if he’d added a pinch of pepper. ‘What happens next has no real scientific basis. It’s simply a way of killing time until the requisite chemical and interdimensional processes in the cauldron have taken place. This is when the traditional spells are chanted. They don’t do a thing, but I can’t help it, I’m fond of the old hocus-pocus.’
He cleared his throat, threw up his arms and declaimed:
‘Let my magic brew revive
that which used to be alive.
Let my bubbling cauldron seethe
till the creature starts to breathe.
Brought to life it then shall be
by the power of alchemy.’
Echo, who was watching everything closely from his elevated vantage point, saw the contents of the cauldron change colour several times and release some iridescent bubbles, which went floating across the laboratory. Ghoolion continued to declaim:
‘Graveyard Gas and Murkholm Mist,
mingled by an alchemist,
can from their mephitic haze
other-worldly phantoms raise.
Spirit, from my brew arise
and take shape before our eyes!’
The liquid swirled up and down, down and up, and the rising bubbles were sucked back into the depths by the little whirlpools that formed here and there. Echo had never seen a liquid behave so strangely. The longer he looked at it, the more he thought he glimpsed objects beneath the surface - alarming, shadowy shapes, as if the cauldron were a window into another world. Then the brew rose at several points like a cloth with something moving beneath it. The depths of the cauldron emitted a growl like that of a beast preparing to pounce at any moment. Echo instinctively retreated a few steps, even though he was up on a table and several feet from what was happening.
‘Hearken, ghost, to what I say,
and my potent spell obey!
Quit your home in Death’s domain,
realm of sorrow and of pain,
hasten through the nameless portals
that divide the dead from mortals!’
The brew became transformed into a miniature sea in a violent storm, an expanse of countless tiny waves, all of which were converging on a focal point. There, in defiance of every law of nature, the foam-capped, snow-white liquid rose into the air. Ghoolion threw up his arms again and cried:
‘Spirit, let your froth and spume
semi-human form assume.
But with arms and legs dispense
- they’d be an irrelevance.
Simply let your weird ensemble
washing on a line resemble!’
The foam swirled upwards like a waterspout, fell back again, then resumed its steady ascent. Echo stepped back and tripped over an old book, almost singeing his tail on an Anguish Candle. The waterspout was now an amorphous shape expanding both upwards and outwards. Echo wondered apprehensively how big the ghost would eventually become. Already as tall as the Alchemaster and still growing, it looked like a shred of wind-wafted silk woven from luminous yarn - a ghostly thing that moved in obedience to the natural laws of another world. Only the thinnest of threads still connected it to the cauldron above which it was floating.