The Alchemaster's Apprentice (28 page)

Read The Alchemaster's Apprentice Online

Authors: Walter Moers

Was Ghoolion making one of his rare excursions into town? Why hadn’t he left him anything to eat? Echo suddenly remembered: he himself was to blame for insisting on a strict diet. But he hadn’t meant Ghoolion to take him so literally. A Crat had to have some breakfast, if only a little bowl of milk and a slice of sausage!
Impatiently, Echo continued to comb the castle for food. The store cupboards, always left open as a rule, were locked. The most delicious smells emanated from them, but the source of those appetising aromas lay beyond his reach.
Echo’s stomach was rumbling. Must he catch himself a mouse? He felt thoroughly disinclined to do so today. His legs were aching like a long-distance runner’s.
There, the scent of roast meat! But it wasn’t coming from the larder. Nor from the kitchen. Echo rounded the next corner and there it was: a neatly laid table. It was just right for someone his size, with a white tablecloth, a vase of flowers, and - most important of all - a crisply roasted fowl on a china plate. He sniffed it. It was a wildfowl of some kind - not his favourite fare. He preferred roast chicken, but that was quite immaterial now. He was starving!
He devoured the bird greedily, legs, breast, wings and all. But he still felt hungry.
That left the giblets. They weren’t his favourite fare either, in the normal way, but beggars couldn’t be choosers. He wolfed the kidneys and liver, even the tough little heart. Then he tackled the gizzard. First he’d better see if there was anything unappetising in there. What had the bird been eating? Echo slit the stomach wall with his claws as deftly as a pathologist performing an autopsy.
The first thing that tumbled out was a juniper berry. Hardly surprising in the case of a wildfowl, thought Echo. He rolled the undigested berry aside and continued his investigation. A hazelnut came to light. Opening the stomach a little wider, he discovered a neat little pellet consisting of tender blades of grass. ‘Hm,’ he thought. A juniper berry, a hazelnut and some blades of grass - why did that sound so familiar?
And then the truth dawned. His appetite abruptly deserted him and an icy shiver ran the length of his spine. A ghostly voice - the voice of someone he knew well - seemed to ring in his ears:
‘I always have a vegetarian breakfast: a juniper berry, a few blades of grass, a hazelnut and three wild strawberries. A healthy start to the day does my gidestive sestym good.’
Echo recoiled, staring in horror at the bird’s gnawed remains. Yes, the proportions and dimensions were about right … There was only one way of finding out for sure. Paws trembling, he opened the stomach completely. Sure enough, it contained three wild strawberries. He went hot and cold in turn, overwhelmed by a terrible feeling of nausea, and backed away from the remains of his frightful repast.
‘No,’ he thought, ‘it’s not possible!’
He walked unsteadily to the window and leapt on to the sill for some fresh air. But that brought him no relief either. On the contrary, he felt more nauseous than ever and couldn’t help gagging.
‘It can’t be true,’ he whispered. Yet he knew that, in his boundless greed, he had just devoured his friend Theodore T. Theodore.
He tottered to the edge of the windowsill and looked down at the town, which seemed to be spinning below him like a top. Then he vomited into space until he felt as if he’d turned himself completely inside out.
Uggly Lane
O
n a misty night, Uggly Lane looked as if a gang of huge brigands in pointed hats had settled down beside a winding street and were lying in wait for passers-by. As he stole past them, Echo was overcome by the uneasy feeling that the crouching giants might rise to their feet at a secret signal and cudgel him to death. There was something both dead and alive about them - something that reminded him unpleasantly of the horrific taxidermal specimens in Ghoolion’s castle. He was as reluctant to turn his back on those figures as he was on the houses in this lane. He had entered a melancholy limbo midway between this world and the next.
The wooden boardwalk gave an agonised groan as Echo put his weight on it. He flinched and quickly got down in the roadway, which wasn’t paved like the rest of the streets in the town and consisted of stamped earth. Plump beetles and other insects were scuttling around on it, but he felt marginally safer in the middle of the lane than he did in the immediate vicinity of the spooky-looking houses.
Wisps of mist were flitting around like Cooked Ghosts, sometimes concealing whole houses from view. An owl hooted, and Echo shivered because the sound reminded him of Theodore.
‘Tuwituwu! Tuwituwu!’
‘What on earth am I doing here?’ he asked himself, peering anxiously in all directions. ‘No one with any sense visits Uggly Lane in the middle of the night. Why didn’t I come here during the day?’
Then he remembered why: because he wouldn’t be able to tell which of the houses was occupied until it was lit up after dark - Theodore had made a point of that. But with all due respect to the Tuwituwu’s good advice, not even the most foolhardy of Malaisea’s stray cats and dogs would ever do such a hare-brained thing. There were too many stories told about the reckless individuals who had ventured into the lane by night, only to meet a gruesome end there.
The story of the Decapitated Tomcat, for example, which was said to appear in the backstreets of Malaisea on the stroke of midnight and the anniversary of its death, walking upright on two legs and carrying its own tear-stained head between its forepaws.
Or the story of the Four Fearless Mongrels, which had gone exploring here for a bet when the moon was full. They returned the following night - amalgamated into a single animal! The poor creatures had been sliced in half and sewn together below the breastbone to form a horrific hybrid with eight forelegs and four heads. But the worst part of the story was that, driven insane by their fate, the four dogs had tried to run in different directions and ripped themselves apart with a frightful rending sound.
Echo was also reminded of the grisly tale of Sweet Siamantha, a greedy Siamese cat which had visited Uggly Lane in her unending search for sweet things to eat. She was now reputed to roam Malaisea at night, her body stripped of its fur and crisply roasted, a carving knife stuck in her belly and a meat fork protruding from her back.
But Echo found these scary stories less perturbing than the actual presence of the Ugglies’ houses. They were such awe-inspiring buildings that not even Ghoolion had dared to have them demolished after evicting their occupants. There was something about their gnarled, organic appearance that made them look inviolable and lent them an aura of venerable indestructibility. Moreover, their dark-brown wooden walls still harboured something - some kind of penetrating odour - which no pettifogging lawyers or bullying bureaucrats could drive out. This was the essence of Ugglydom itself, a clearly detectable source of energy that pervaded the entire lane, as potent as any evil curse.
Since Ugglies were legally prohibited from installing street lights, the only lighting was provided by the reflection of the moon in some rain-filled potholes. Echo paused beside one of these puddles, which looked in the gloom like a pool of blood.
He had now reached the end of the lane without spotting a single lighted window.
‘Good,’ he thought, feeling relieved. ‘There’s no one living here, so I’ll make myself scarce.’
He was just about to turn round when, only a few Crat’s lengths away, the wind wafted a shred of mist into the air like a conjurer whipping a cloth off a birdcage. It rose into the night sky and there, in the place where it had been hovering only a moment ago, stood the only house in the lane from which light was coming.
Echo didn’t move. He scowled at the building, which seemed to have sprouted from the ground like a mushroom. He’d been just about to beat a retreat on the pretext of having failed to find the confounded place, but there it was, and he could have sworn it was returning his gaze. Noticeably bigger than the rest, though not by much, it was the only detached house in the lane. Candlelight flickered fitfully behind its soot-encrusted windowpanes and Echo could hear music - a soft, haunting melody. Someone was singing in a deep voice and simultaneously beating time. It struck him as the ideal background music for a ritual in which dogs were sewn together or cats skinned alive.
For some inexplicable reason, however, the house exerted an attraction on him. ‘I could do with a little Placebo Wart Ointment,’ he murmured to himself as he trotted towards it. ‘And possibly a couple of quality-controlled curses as well.’
What was he talking about? Placebo Wart Ointment? Quality-controlled curses? Why should he suddenly develop a hankering for things he’d never even heard of? Why this irresistible urge to climb the steps of the veranda? What was that funny smell?
He was on the veranda before he knew it, right outside the Uggly’s front door. The little candlelight that filtered through the sooty windowpanes was just sufficient for him to read the noticeboards nailed to it.
Currently in Stock:
Quality-Controlled Curses
Prophecies of All Kinds
(Accuracy Not Guaranteed)
 
Placebo Wart Ointment
(Discreetly Packaged)
Aha, so those were the only kinds of services an Uggly was still permitted to offer in Malaisea. Ghoolion had certainly done a thorough job of making it hard for the Ugglies to practise their profession and utilise their special abilities.
Another notice board read:
Warning!
You enter these premises at your own risk. The ingestion of Ugglian pharmaceuticals, quality-controlled or not, can damage your health. Do not believe a word an Uggly says, especially when she claims to foretell the future. And, if you have a problem with warts, consult your GP or a pharmacist!
 
 
Succubius Ghoolion
Municipal Alchemaster-in-Chief
Yet another notice read:
This Establishment is Subject to
 
Municipal Ordinance No. 52736 pertaining to Ugglies
 
Should an offence against one of its provisions
come to your notice, kindly report this at once
to the Municipal Alchemaster-in-Chief.
The offender will be summarily punished
in your presence, if you so desire.
These noticeboards conveyed such a vivid impression of the bleak professional existence led by the Uggly who lived here that Echo suddenly felt profoundly sorry for her. Besides, his craving for some Placebo Wart Ointment had become quite overpowering, so he decided to make his presence known at last. But what was the best way to attract an Uggly’s attention? Should he call? Knock? Scratch at the door? Echo opted for a method he seldom employed: he miaowed as piteously and plaintively as he could. An encounter based on mutual compassion might be the best way of avoiding any unpleasantness.
The door opened almost at once, and more quietly than Echo would have thought possible in the case of so old a building. He had expected to hear rusty hinges squeal in agony, but the door half-opened as quietly as a flower coming into bloom. Nothing happened for a while. Then the silence was broken by a voice that sounded as if its owner had lived for centuries on unwholesome, trance-inducing substances.
‘If you aren’t the Alchemaster, come in.’
Cautiously, Echo squeezed through the crack. The contrast between the cool night air and the steamy atmosphere inside, which smelt of soup and other less familiar aromas, was such that he felt he’d been wrapped in damp cotton wool. The Uggly was standing with her back to him, lit by the dancing flames of a stove. The weird music had ceased.
‘You must be really hungry, Pussycat,’ she said in a deep bass voice, ‘to come begging for food at night in Uggly Lane, of all places. Didn’t anyone tell you it’s haunted by the Decapitated Tomcat?’
‘I’m not hungry,’ said Echo. ‘Nor am I a pussycat.’

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