If You’re Reading This, It’s Too Late (15 page)

As she turned to go, a muffled cry echoed in the stone room. “Was that — it sounded like an animal,” she said, peering into the darkness. “Or perhaps a —”

“Perhaps the smell
is
rather close in here,” said the alchemist. “It seems to be affecting your imagination. Now get out!”

The housekeeper opened the door again and this time the beam of light fell on the alchemist.

“One more thing, Fräulein — I am no mere doctor any longer,” he said, his face floating like some terrible apparition among the swirling particles of dust. “For I have learned secrets long buried under pyramids. Powers known only to the kings of ancient Egypt. From now on, you will address me as
Pharaoh.
No . . .
Lord
Pharaoh.”

“Yes, Lord Pharaoh,” said the housekeeper, hurrying out.

When the door closed behind the housekeeper, the newly crowned Lord Pharaoh hovered over the tub in the corner of the room. A large flask was half submerged in the sludge, its glass top glinting in the light of the fire.

Whimpering, gurgling sounds were emitted from the flask.

“Yes, my beautiful, my ugly little creature, your time has come,” said the alchemist, pulling the dripping flask out of the tub and holding it high above his head.

“Oh, miracle of nature. Nay, miracle of man. Nay, miracle of my own hands!” he proclaimed. “The world will behold you with awe — and to me they will bow!”

The flask had a long, narrow neck and a large, rounded bottom. In the dim light, not much of its contents could be seen — except a tiny foot curled up under a little leg and an unexpectedly large nose pressed against the glass.

When Cass read the last line, Max-Ernest let out a little gasp.

Cass looked at him. “Scared?”

“Just keep reading . . . !” Max-Ernest peered over Cass’s shoulder to see what came next.

“Can’t I take a breath?” said Cass. “Besides, I thought you didn’t believe in the homunculus, anyway.”

“Yeah, but it’s still a good story.”

“Even though you don’t think it’s true? Then how come you always say you only like nonfiction?” Cass grinned. She was enjoying this.

“Just read already!”

“Here, you read — I’ll hold the flashlight.”

Part the Second

T
en years later . . .

The shimmering ball spun in the air, making a strange and wonderful sort of music. It seemed to incorporate all the sounds and voices of nature and yet to come from another world altogether.

Watching and listening from the opposite end of the king’s throne room was a creature no less fantastical but far more earthly.

Normally, this creature — although called many names he had no name to call his own — hated crowds. They always stared and pointed and threw things. But he found if he concentrated on the wondrous, spinning instrument — if instrument indeed it was — then he could almost ignore the faces of the courtiers lined up on either side of him.

He felt a tug on his iron collar, followed by the sharp crack of a whip on his shoulder. His master was urging him forward.

“Your Majesty, Lord Pharaoh and his Homunculus!” a royal guard announced with a flourish.

The Homunculus — for he was the creature so described — shuffled forward, his shoulder still smarting with pain.

“Lord Pharaoh, is it?” asked the heavyset monarch sitting on the throne.
^*
“And who granted you that title?”

“I beg your forgiveness, Sire. A village magician’s folly — that is all,” said Lord Pharaoh, bowing with uncharacteristic and clearly unfelt obsequiousness.

The King nodded impatiently. “So this is the miraculous creation we have been hearing about, is it? The Bavarian marvel. He doesn’t look like much — just another carnival dwarf.”

Lord Pharaoh kicked the Homunculus from behind — whether to prove the king’s point or to push him forward was unclear.

“If you please, Your Majesty, it is not so much how he looks, as how he was made. . . .”

“Is it true he was made from dung?” asked the bejeweled Queen sitting by the King’s side.

“Not
from
dung, Your Highness.
In
dung,” Lord Pharaoh corrected. “He was incubated in a fertile mud that I confess was not entirely savory.”

“Disgusting! He’s a monster!” said a pale woman standing nearby, the Queen’s Lady-in-Waiting. “And so . . . small!”

“So what then is the recipe for this dung-dwarf?” asked the King, silencing the Lady-in-Waiting with a look. “They say you have discovered the secret of the Philosopher’s Stone.”

“Ah, a thousand pardons, but I cannot reveal that, Your Majesty. It may be that I am privy to secrets once known only to the Ancients. But such power, if it fell into the wrong hands —”

“Are you so sure your hands are the right ones?” asked the King sternly.

At this, his master’s face turned red, the Homunculus observed. He knew he would pay for it later, but he couldn’t help being pleased by the sight of his master’s embarrassment.

“You jest, Your Majesty,” said Lord Pharaoh, smiling to conceal his fury.

“I never jest — that is his job,” said the King. He pointed to a small, wiry man who was now holding in his hand the strange musical ball that had so fascinated the Homunculus.

“Yes, His Majesty is not the Jester — for that is I,” said the man, shaking the bells that dangled from his hat as if to demonstrate. “No more is His Majesty the
Ma-jester
— for that is my mother!”

He threw his ball into the air, punctuating his joke with a few notes of music. Then he burst out laughing, as if he tickled himself so much he couldn’t help it.

“And what else of your creature — does he not speak?” asked the King, ignoring the Jester.

“No, Sire,” answered Lord Pharaoh curtly.

This was a sore subject for the alchemist. The Homunculus knew he would get extra lashings later just because the King had mentioned it.

Lord Pharaoh knew — or strongly suspected — that in fact his creation could speak. Once, when the Homunculus thought his master was away, he’d made the mistake of practicing his speech at a slightly louder level than his usual whisper. His large, fleshy tongue made enunciation difficult, and he’d just managed to say the words “I am Cab —” when the door to his dungeon room flew open and his master entered.

Excited by the prospect of the fame and riches a talking homunculus would bring, Lord Pharaoh demanded that he repeat the words. But the Homunculus never uttered another syllable again — even when he was alone. So little did he want to please his master, he was willing to endure years of beatings to avoid doing what his master wished.

The Jester studied the creature’s reactions as his master spoke about him.

“Truly? Your carnival sensation — hath he not sensation?” asked the Jester. “He hath the nose of an elephant and the ears likewise. As for his eyes, we cannot help but see that he can see. His great tongue — does it only taste and never talk . . . ?”

“Silence, Jester! We do not like the look of you,
Lord Pharaoh,
” said the King, pronouncing the name with disdain. “But we think perhaps we are safer with you in our court than without. You will be our guest for as long as you wish to stay in our Kingdom.”

“Thank you, Your Majesty,” said Lord Pharaoh, bowing with as much humility as he could muster.

A royal guard stepped forward to escort them out.

“Where sleeps the Homunculus — with the servants?” asked the guard.

“With the livestock,” said Lord Pharaoh, fixing the Homunculus with a hard, angry stare. “He is dumb like an animal so he will lie like an animal.”

“Methinks he lies not like an animal, but like a rascal. And he be not dumb but would not speak,” said the Jester with a twinkle in his eye. “If my thought be shrewd, he is no more fool than I!”

“But you
are
a fool, Fool!” said the King, laughing. “And you are hard on the poor creature.”

“Not half so hard as his master. I inflict only puns; he inflicts punishments,” said the Jester.

“Mind your own business, you meddlesome idiot!” hissed Lord Pharaoh, his mask of politeness slipping.

“But fooling
is
my business,” said the Jester, tossing his ball into the air.

The Homunculus stared at the ball as it started once more to sing.

Max-Ernest turned the pages over. “I can’t read if you don’t shine the light on it. . . .”

“Sorry, I just wanted to see the Sound Prism again,” said Cass, unwrapping the object she had just dug out of the ground. It glowed in the darkness. “It’s definitely the ball in the story. It has to be.” She looked at Max-Ernest, waiting for him to contra-dict her.

“What? I agree. It’s the ball in the story. . . .”

Cass nodded in satisfaction and shone the flashlight on the manuscript again.

“But that doesn’t mean the rest of the story is true.”

“Why do you have to take the fun out of everything? It’s like when you’re reading a book, and you’re really into it, and then at the end the writer says it was all a dream . . . I hate that!”

“I didn’t say it was a dream.”

Cass sighed. “Never mind. Just read.” She flipped the manuscript back over for him and pointed to where they were on the page.

Part the Third

H
e might not get much sleep, but, at least, the Homunculus reflected, it wouldn’t be a cold night.

The pigpen was nothing if not warm. The pigs were packed so tight they could barely turn around. Steam rose with every snort and kick and bowel movement.

Alas, warm did not mean comfortable. These pigs were not cuddly creatures. Instead, they had mottled bristly coats caked in mud and feces, and they had hard hooves and hungry mouths and long, fight-sharpened tusks.

In short, they were hogs. Swine.

The Homunculus cowered in the corner of the pen, waiting for the hogs to realize he wasn’t one of them, and that he had quite possibly been left for them to eat. And yet he bore them no resentment. He felt an affectionate kinship with these beasts — and not only because their snouts resembled a bit his own. They too were helpless captives, condemned to feed on scraps, never satisfied, forever hungry.

Ah, hunger.

Hunger was his first memory, his only memory. Before the red glow of the furnace there was hunger. Before the cold stone walls of his dungeon room there was hunger. Before the painful blows of his master there was hunger. Before the jeering crowds there was hunger. This gnawing pit inside him. This never-healing wound.

His master never fed him more than the bare minimum necessary to keep him alive — and sometimes not even that much. Often, he had to feed on the cockroaches that found their way into his room. If he was very, very lucky, and the housekeeper took pity on him, he might get a bone to gnaw on now and then. Bones were his favorite food. He sucked out the rich, buttery marrow as if his life depended on his extracting every last drop.

If only he could have some bone marrow now!

He looked at the hogs around him, weighing the odds: if he struck first, would he eat or would he be eaten?

Lost in his bloody reverie, he didn’t notice the tune playing in the barnyard outside the pigpen until it was quite close. But his attention finally shifted to the ethereal music — so utterly unlike his muddy, grunting surroundings that it seemed to come from some other plane of existence altogether.

“Where art thou, my little ’Munculus?”

The Homunculus saw the Jester’s face peering into the pen before the Jester saw him. Instinctively, he recoiled. No one had ever sought him out before except to throw rocks at him or worse.

“Ah, there you are — if not a pearl among swine, then certainly the Earl!” proclaimed the Jester with a laugh. “Here — I have brought you dinner. From the table of the King, no less!”

He tossed a turkey leg into the pen. The Homunculus caught it with his large hand — and immediately devoured it, bone and all.

“What? Nary a thank-you?” teased the Jester. “Are you but a hog, after all?”

The Homunculus did not answer, but he looked up from his drumstick long enough to lock eyes with the Jester.

“Speak, Dung-boy! Prove thou art not pork but person!”

Addressed so directly, the Homunculus trembled uncontrollably. He did not how to react.

“Fear not your master. He is nowhere near. We are alone among animals. And unless they also speak, your secret is safe,” said the Jester more gently.

“Come now, are we not alike, you and I?”

The Jester removed his hat, revealing for the first time his ears — they were unusually large and pointy.

“Can you talk? If you can, I wouldst talk with you.”

The Homunculus could not have said why he answered the Jester, when for years he had refused to speak. He was so unfamiliar with kindness that he did not recognize it; and yet he responded like a kitten to its first bowl of milk.

“I c-can,” he whispered.

“What’s that? I didn’t hear you.”

“I can,” said the Homunculus more loudly. “I
can
speak.”

“Well done!” said the Jester, smiling.

Hearing his first words of praise, the Homunculus’s chest swelled with a feeling others might have known as pride. And something strange happened, something that had never happened before no matter how hungry he’d been or how hard his master had beaten him — he cried.

“Oh, talking is not so bad as that,” said the Jester. “True, most people say only silly things when they speak. But it’s easier to ignore them if you’re saying silly things yourself.”

The Homunculus stared, uncomprehending.

The Jester laughed. “So he can talk but he knows not a joke. What use is that? But perhaps I can teach you to laugh. Fancy that — a Jester for a teacher! That makes for a joke already!”

Unfortunately, the homunculus’s unexpected speech had roused the hogs, and they were now closing in on him with hungry suspicion.

“Here, beat them back with this,” said the Jester, throwing an oaken staff into the pen. “We must act fast if you are to escape. Methinks the hogs are easier to outrun than the King’s hounds.”

As soon as the Homunculus had extracted himself from the pigpen, the Jester stopped him with a raised hand. “Wait, my friend. What are you called? I cannot rescue a man if I know not his name!”