The Alchemist

The winter had been harsh, bitter, and cruel. My brother and I struggled to keep the family farm going ever since our dad left the two of us alone to fight in one of the king’s desperate resource wars. I think we did as well as could be expected of two young boys still a few years away from adulthood. Just as our father kept stern control over everything that happened on the farm, I tried to keep that spirit going. It was in the midst of a terrible blizzard that my brother contracted his illness. It started with a cough and developed into a full fever in no time at all. The snow descended upon us like a savage army and the nearest town was too far away from our little farm to make the journey without succumbing to the elements. I’d hoped in vain that he would be able to fight it off, I even demanded of fate to spare him his miserable fate. Soon, I knew he wasn’t going to make it without some form of healing. I had heard rumors of an alchemist that could cure almost any ailment who lived much nearer to my home. She lived far away from society, perhaps to avoid judgement for her practice or perhaps out of the simple joy of being alone. Many had gone to seek her assistance over the years with all sorts of concerns. She was known for being difficult to persuade into helping. Still, I was at the end of my rope and I was not willing to let go of the last family I had. So I swaddled my brother in every warm garment I could find, and with much difficulty, I hitched him to a sled and dragged him through the snow to the alleged location of the alchemist’s home.

Squinting my eyes against the wind and snow, I first perceived the alchemists shed as a yawning void in the distance, looming overhead. The wood it was constructed from was black and rotting away. It leaned heavily to the side and needed support beams hammered into a tree beside it to hold its weight. The shack creaked and groaned so loudly against the wind I was half-afraid the damned thing was going to fall over and crush me if I knocked on the door too hard. I would have thought it abandoned if it weren’t for the smoke rising from the chimney. I knocked on the door, gently but firmly. There was no answer. I knocked a little harder, still no answer. We couldn’t stand out here much longer. So I wrapped on the door and began to shout.

“Please open the door!” There was desperation in my voice, “I need your help! My brother is dying, please!”

I heard the latch begin to turn, and the door opened slightly. All I could see of the person behind the door was her eye, covered by a glass lens that reflected the white light of the snow outside.

“Who are you?” said the figure at the door.

“Are you the alchemist?” I said.

The figure repeated harshly, “Who ARE you?”

“My name is Malcolm, and this is my brother, Luke. He is very sick and I fear he won’t survive the winter. You’re the only one I can turn to.”

“Do you have any money?”

“No but-“

“Then go away, this isn’t a charity.” She moved to close the door but I grabbed it and held it open.

“The winter is brutal, and I know you will need help to do your work up here. I will do anything you ask, just please save my brother’s life.” There was a pause. I could feel the cold contempt of her gaze from behind her spectacles. The door shut for a moment, there was a metallic clink from inside, then it swung wide open to let us in.

“Bring him in, and don’t touch anything.”

I dragged my brother into the shack and laid him shivering and sputtering on the bed in the small bedroom inside. The interior was roomy but the space was choked with mountains of books and papers. Bizarre, bloodstained instruments that looked like they could be torture devices were piled up to the ceiling. The walls were lined with shelves containing strange specimen, some living and some dead. All had been impaled upon sharp sticks and held in place inside the jars, writhing around the spike like a grotesque dance.

The alchemist came up and locked her dark, voidish eyes with me and for a moment. Only now did I really get a good look at her. Her features were pointed and severe. Her hair was pure white, but she looked too young to be graying like that. She wore thick black gloves and a work apron covered in many years’ worth of stains. She also wore brown, work trousers and thick leather boots.

Her voice was breathless and quiet. “I need someone to gather and prepare ingredients as well as general supplies while I work. Be my live-in assistant for the winter, and I will heal your brother. Understood?”

“Understood.”

She got to work grabbing a vial filled with a dark, viscous liquid. It looked like raw sewage and the surface of the liquid had a layer of mucous like film over it. She poured the contents into Luke’s mouth. Luke let out a pained groan; it seemed the taste alone was enough to rouse him to from his delirium. He began to spasm violently and the black liquid came bubbling up from his throat and dribbled out the corner of his mouth. His horrified eyes starred pleading into space.

“What the hell are you doing to him!?” I yelled

“Silence,” said the alchemist, grabbing something else.

When, at least, she finished, Luke seemed to rest somewhat soundly.

“Your brother will be fine. He should awaken in a month’s time,” the alchemist said to me, gathering her belongings heading up the rickety stairs. “You may sleep in the attic tonight. Sleep well. I will have need of you in the morning.”

With that she vanished up the stairs. I stood and watched my brother uneasily. His face looked calm despite how he looked just a few minutes prior. I thought of how he was before his illness took him. After our father left and put us in charge of the home, Luke had little hope that he would return. This was something I often feuded with him over. Luke fell into despair and I had to push him hard to keep up with his share of the work. Still, he kept a good humor about him, annoying yet comforting. Looking at him in the bed, I wondered if I had been too hard on him.

What followed was a month of grueling labor that drained every ounce of my strength. The days were spent gathering ingredients for the alchemist’s experiments which often meant traveling for miles in the freezing cold to hazardous environments. I learned, from talking with the alchemist that she preferred to be alone because there was no one that could appreciate her art.

“People fear the potential of my work, what I’m capable of. So they shut me out and pretend I don’t exist until they need me.” She had said one evening as we chopped some ingredients for a concoction she was brewing. She never passed up a chance to explain her work to me, though I could never understand it.

More than once, I risked my life capture a wild boar for her. She used a potion from a special kind of plant the alchemist called a “shou root” to pacify and sedate it. What it actually did was put it into some kind of waking slumber. I hated to see her work. I was not allowed to see Luke since the first day of us being here. I often saw her entering and leaving the room at odd hours, perhaps to check on his progress. The injuries and the work I could endure, but what really wore me down was not knowing how Luke was doing; the lack of control I had over the situation. I counted the days as the month went by.

The final experiment the alchemist tasked me with required a dead rabbit, so she sent me out to find one. Rifle in hand, shivering against the bitter, cold wind, I went out to secure her prize. I’d hunted before of course, but never alone. Never without my father by my side. Never during a winter as harsh as this one. The woods I’d hunted in with dad were now barren, the trees bear, the ground featureless and white. Finding anything alive in these conditions would be no easy task.

The only sound was the soft crunch of the snow beneath my boots. In the corner of my eye, I saw a flash of movement, a white speck dashing across a darkened fallen tree. I positioned my rifle and waited. In an instant I saw movement again and fired before I even knew it. I felt the familiar jolt of the rifle through my whole body. The blast echoed in the empty wilderness and then there was silence, save for the ringing in my ears. Smoke rose from the barrel. Carefully, I trudged to the spot I was aiming at. I had hit something. A healthy sized rabbit laid dead before me, its blood splattered and steaming on the snow. I slung the gun over my shoulder and picked up the carcass.

I made my way back to the shack, wiping my feet off at the entrance so as to avoid sullying the countless papers strewn about the floor. The alchemist was bent over her desk, pouring over a series of texts spread out before her.

“I have the rabbit.”

“Yes I know. Could you have been any louder?”

“Don’t know how you expect me to fire a rifle quietly.”

“Just bring it here. Lay it on the table,” she said, pushing her books aside. I placed the rabbit carcass on the table. The alchemist began to poke and prod it.

“I wish you hadn’t hit its head. It will be much harder to do what I need to now,” she said, examining the hole in the rabbit’s skull, blood still pouring from the wound and staining the papers on the desk. “Though I must admit, it is an admirable shot.”

“My father taught me well.” I said, humbly.

“Yes, I know. You mention him quite a lot.”

She grabbed a sack she had ready under the table and pulled from it a handful of what looked like a kind of maggots, shoving them into the exposed flesh in the rabbit’s head and rapping it in bandages. Grabbing a glass bottle beside her, she filled it with a very thin fluid tinted green, and poured it into the rabbit’s open mouth. At this point I couldn’t bear to look any longer. So I left the alchemist to her business.

I heard an unholy shriek behind me. When I turned to investigate, the alchemist had her hands submerged in a black fluid in the sink. In her hands, the rabbit thrashed around, trying with all its might to free itself from her grasp. Its eyes were wide open in horror, black as pitch. The other creatures in cages all around the shack were roused from their rest and began hollering discontentedly. Soon the cacophony of pained caterwauls became more than I could bear, so I ran outside to face the bitter cold. The silence was a relief compared to the noise inside.

I thought of those afternoons I spent hunting with my father. Of his stern but gentle tone as he instructed me on the proper way to handle a rifle. I thought of how he looked with the autumn sunset behind him, silhouetting his profile as he stalked a nearby dear. Only now did I realize that would be the last time I’d ever see him. If I didn’t get Luke back, I would be alone.

Suddenly, I heard the alchemist scream in pain from inside. I burst through the door to find that the abominable creature had bit down into the alchemist’s hand. She beat its head against the sink but to no avail. Her hand was gushing blood, the rabbit’s teeth had sunk in too deep. She hastily grabbed a pistol from the drawer beside the sink. With a loud bang, she shot the rabbit’s head, spilling what remained of its brains into the water in the sink. She collapsed onto the floor recoiled in pain.

“Bandages! Upstairs! Go!”

After her wounds were wrapped up we sat together, backs braced against the sink cabinet. She shook, gripping tightly to her mangled hand, her fingers rigid and frozen in place, for she had lost the ability to move them. I knew she would lose the hand, and so did she.

“Listen, I cannot fix my hand. The damage to the tendons is too severe. I can’t treat your brother with a missing hand, but there is something you can do.”

Dread coiled around my heart like a snake and constricted.

“I can replace my hand with yours. It would be a simple procedure. After that, I can heal your brother, and you can be on your way.”

One final price to pay for Luke’s life. To get him back, I was willing to do just about anything. I agreed. She promised to heavily sedate me for the operation. I wouldn’t feel a thing. Whatever she gave me did the trick. The last thing I remember was her standing over me as my vision blurred and everything went black. I was at her mercy.

When I awoke, my head felt as though someone had driven a spike between my eyes. I was alone in my room in the attic; the moonlight streaming in from the window high above my head was the only source of light. I must have been out for days. I looked at the bandages on my wrist. The cut was clumsy, she had only one good hand after all, but the wound was treated well enough. I tried to stand with what little strength I had. I stumbled many times and nearly fell down the stairs but I managed my way to the main floor. I hobbled my way to the room where my brother was kept, clutching the painful stump of my wrist. The alchemist stood over Luke, her back to me, blocking the sight of his face. She did not turn when I entered.

“You know, I really can’t thank you enough for everything, and I don’t just mean the hand.” She held her right hand for me to see. Seeing my hand upon her wrist turned my stomach. A ghastly rim of scar tissue separated my dark skin from her bright pale skin.

“When you first came to me I knew your brother was done for. But, I thought it would be a compelling challenge to see if I could save him. I had been working on this remedy for a long time, but my biggest obstacle was the lack of human subjects to test it on.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” I circled around her slowly, giving her as wide a birth as I could in the tiny room. I couldn’t stand being near her.

“I hope you’ll understand. There was no way I could have saved him, but I still couldn’t wait for him to die on his own. It would’ve taken weeks.”

I was at the foot of the bed now and I saw Luke’s face illuminated only by the cold moon from the window beside his bed. He was so thin, almost skeletal. His cheek bones protruded casting deep, severe shadows. His expression however, was calm. Trance-like. Like he was in a waking slumber.

His eyes were pitch black.

“What did you do to him?” I demanded, grabbing the alchemist by the collar of her shirt with my remaining hand. Rage engulfed me like a crashing wave.

“I saved him, as best I could.” She answered in her calm, steady voice.

“You killed him!”

“And brought him back.”

“You turned him into a monster like that damn rabbit!” I was shaking now, I could barely control myself.

“He won’t hurt you so long as you give him a steady supply of shou root. I would be more than happy to supply you with enough to last the rest of your life, in exchange for regular reports on the specimen of course.”

I looked over to Luke again. He wheezed pitifully in his bed.

“I didn’t want this.” I said.

“But what difference does it make? He’s alive after all, is he not,” she said with a tone that seemed bewildered that I would have an issue with any of this. Someone like her couldn’t understand the importance of life. “In any case,” she continued, “I’ve fulfilled my end of the bargain. If your that unhappy, feel free to leave him with me.”

I wanted to burn this whole shack to the ground. But then, I thought of the prospect of leaving Luke with the alchemist. What she might do to him. No, he was my brother. If anyone should possess him, it should be me. Better to have him back in any capacity than to not have him at all. He was my responsibility. I bundled him up again, as I had when I first arrived at this cursed house, and left without another word to the alchemist.

The journey home was long and arduous. The storm had let up since last month. I kept looking back at Luke while I dragged his sled with my last good hand, perhaps hoping to see life in his eyes again. His breathing was strained but steady, alive but not there. At last, my home revealed itself over the horizon. The fields, once rich with life, were now dead and barren.