The Alchemyst (26 page)

“Flamel says the Elders—the Dark Elders, he calls them—would destroy the world.”

Dee shrugged. “Believe me when I tell you that he’s lying to you. The Elders would be able to change this world for the better….” Dee’s fingers moved in the water, the ripples languid and mesmerizing. Startled, Josh saw images forming in the water, the pictures matching Dee’s soothing words. “In the ancient past, the earth was a paradise. It had an incredibly advanced technology, but the air was clean, the water pure, the seas unpolluted.”

There was a rippling image of an island set under cloudless azure skies. Endless fields of golden wheat marched into the distance. Trees were laden with an assortment of exotic fruit.

“Not only did the Elder Race shape this world, they even nudged a primitive hominid on the road to evolution. But the Elders were driven out from this paradise by the foolish superstition of the mad Abraham and the spells in the Codex. The Elders did not die—it takes a lot to kill one of the Elder Race—they simply waited. They knew that someday mankind would come to its senses and call them back to save the earth.”

Josh could not take his eyes off the sparkling water. Much of what Dee said sounded plausible.

“If we can bring them back, the Elders have the powers and the abilities to reshape this world. They can make the deserts bloom….”

An image formed in the water: huge windblown desert dunes turning green with lush grass.

Another image appeared. Josh was looking at the earth from space, just like Google Earth. A huge swirl of dense cloud had formed over the Gulf of Mexico, heading toward Texas. “They can control the weather,” Dee said, and the storm dissipated.

Dee’s fingers moved and there appeared the unmistakable image of a hospital ward with a long row of empty beds.

“And they can cure disease. Remember, these beings were worshipped as gods because of their powers. And these are the ones Flamel is trying to stop us from bringing back to the world.”

It took Josh an age to form the single-word question. “Why?” He couldn’t work out why Flamel would want to prevent such obvious advances.

“Because he has masters, Elders like Hekate and the Witch of Endor, for example, who want the world to dissolve into chaos and anarchy. When that happens, they can come out of the shadows and declare themselves the rulers of the earth.” Dee shook his head sadly. “It pains me to say this, but Flamel does not care about you, nor does he care about your sister. He put her in terrible danger today simply to roughly Awaken her powers. The Elders I work with take three days to bring someone through the Awakening ceremony.”

“Three days,” Josh mumbled. “Flamel said there was no one else in North America who could Awaken me.” He didn’t want to believe Dee…and yet everything the man said sounded so
reasonable.

“Another lie. My Elders could Awaken you. And they would do it properly and safely. It is, after all, such a dangerous process.”

Dee got up slowly and walked around to crouch beside Josh, bringing his eyes level with the boy’s face. Fog was beginning to thicken and swirl around the fountain, shifting and eddying as he moved. Dee’s voice was silky smooth, a gentle monotone exactly in sync with the rippling water. “What’s your name?”

“Josh.”

“Josh,” Dee echoed, “where is Nicholas Flamel now?”

Even in his drowsy state, an alarm bell—very faint and very, very distant—went off in Josh’s head. He couldn’t trust Dee, he
shouldn’t
trust Dee…and yet so much of what he said had the ring of truth to it.

“Where is he, Josh?” Dee persisted.

Josh started to shake his head. Even though he believed Dee—everything he said made perfect sense—he wanted to talk to Sophie first, he needed to get her advice and opinion.

“Tell me.” Dee lifted Josh’s limp hand and placed it in the pool. Ripples spun out from it. They settled into the image of a small antiques shop filled with glassware, directly across the road from Libbey Park. Grinning triumphantly, Dee came to his feet and whirled around, staring across the road as he activated his senses.

He located their auras immediately.

The green of Flamel, the gray of Scathach, Endor’s brown and the girl’s pure silver. He had them—and this time there would be no mistakes, no escape.

“You sit here and enjoy the pretty pictures,” Dee murmured, patting Josh on the shoulder. The water bloomed with exotic, fractal-like patterns, mesmerizing and hypnotic. “I’ll be back for you shortly.” Then, without moving a muscle, he called in his waiting army.

Abruptly, the fog thickened and darkened, stinking of rotten eggs and something else: dust and dry earth, damp and mold.

And horror descended on Ojai.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

N
icholas Flamel’s hands were already beginning to glow with green light when he pulled open the door of the small shop, grimacing in annoyance as the bell jangled merrily.

The sun had dipped below the horizon while the Witch worked with Sophie, and a chill fog had rolled down the valley. It swirled and rolled the length of Ojai Avenue, curling and twisting through the trees, leaving everything it touched beaded with moisture. Cars crept along, their headlights outlined in huge halos of light barely able to penetrate the gloom. The street was completely deserted; the people outside had all been dressed for summer weather and had fled indoors away from the damp.

Scatty joined Flamel at the door. She carried a short sword in one hand, a nunchaku in the other, dangling loosely on its chain. “This is not good, not good at all.” She breathed deeply. “Smell that?”

Flamel nodded. “Sulfur. The odor of Dee.”

Scatty rattled the nunchaku. “He’s really starting to annoy me.”

Somewhere in the distance there was a metallic bang as two cars collided. A car alarm echoed forlornly behind them. And there was a scream, high-pitched and terrifying, and then another and another.

“It’s coming. Whatever it is,” Nicholas Flamel said grimly.

“We don’t want to be trapped here,” Scatty said. “Let’s find Josh and get back to the car.”

“Agreed. He who retreats lives longer.” He turned to look back into the shop. The Witch of Endor had Sophie by the arm and was whispering urgently to her. Wisps of white smoke still curled off the girl, and tendrils of white air dripped from her fingers like unwound bandages.

Sophie leaned forward and kissed the old woman on the cheek, then she turned and hurried down the length of the shop. “We have to go,” she said breathlessly, “we have to get away from here.” She had no idea what lay outside, but her newfound knowledge enabled her imagination to populate the fog with any number of monstrous creatures.

“And close the door behind you,” the Witch called out.

And at that moment all the lights flickered and died. Ojai was plunged into darkness.

The bell jangled as the trio stepped out into the now-deserted street. The fog had become so thick that drivers had been forced to pull off the road and there was no longer traffic moving on the main street. An air of unnatural silence had fallen. Flamel turned to Sophie. “Can you pinpoint Josh?”

“He said he’d wait for us in the park.” She squinted, trying to penetrate the fog, but it was so thick that she could barely see a foot in front of her face. With Flamel and Scatty on either side of her, she stepped off the sidewalk and made her way to the middle of the empty road. “Josh?” The fog swallowed her words, muffling them to little more than a whisper. “Josh,” she called again.

There was no response.

A sudden thought struck her and she flung out her right hand, fingers splayed. A puff of air curled from her hand, but did nothing to the fog except make it swirl and dance. She tried again, and an icy gale whipped across the street, cutting a neat corridor through the fog, catching the rear wing of an abandoned car in the middle of the road, leaving a ragged indentation in the metal. “Whoops. I guess I have to practice,” she muttered.

A shape stepped into the opening in the fog, and then a second and a third. And none of them were alive.

Closest to Sophie, Flamel and Scatty was a complete skeleton, standing tall and straight, wearing the ragged remains of the blue uniform coat of a U.S. cavalry officer. It carried the rusted stump of a sword in bony fingers. When it turned its head toward them, the bones at the base of its skull popped and cracked.

“Necromancy,” Flamel breathed. “Dee’s raised the dead.”

Another figure loomed out of the fog: it was the partially mummified body of a man carrying a huge railroad hammer. Behind it came another dead man, whose remaining flesh was tanned to the consistency of leather. A pair of withered leather gun belts was slung low across his hips, and when he saw the group, he reached for the missing guns with skeletal fingers.

Sophie stood frozen in shock, and the wind died away from her fingers. “They’re dead,” she whispered. “Skeletons. Mummies. They’re all dead.”

“Yep,” Scathach said matter-of-factly, “skeletons and mummies. It depends on what type of ground they were buried in. Damp soil, you get skeletons.” She stepped forward and swept out with a nunchaku, knocking the head clear off another gunslinger, who’d been attempting to raise a rusted rifle to his shoulder. “Dry soil, you get the mummies. Doesn’t stop them from hurting you, though.” The skeletal cavalry officer with the broken sword lashed out at her, and she parried with her own sword. His rusted blade dissolved into dust. Scatty’s sword swung again and separated the head from the body, which then immediately crumpled to the ground.

Although the shambling figures moved in complete silence, there were screams all around now. And even though they were muffled by the fog, fear and abject terror were clearly audible in them. The ordinary citizens of Ojai had become aware that the dead were walking through their streets.

The fog was now thick with the creatures. They came from all sides, crowding in on the trio, encircling them in the center of the road. As the twisting sheets of dampness eddied and flowed, more and more skeletal and mummified remains were revealed in brief glimpses: soldiers in the tattered blues and grays of Civil War uniforms; farmers in rags of old-fashioned overalls; cowboys in worn chaps and torn denim; women in long, sweeping skirts, now moldy and ragged; miners in threadbare buckskins.

“He’s emptied a boot hill graveyard from one of the old abandoned towns!” Scatty exclaimed, standing with her back to Sophie, striking out around her. “No one here’s in clothes made after 1880.” Two skeletal women wearing matching bonnets and the rags of their Sunday best clicked their way on bony feet across Ojai Avenue toward her, arms outstretched. Scatty’s sword whipped around, slicing away the arms, but that didn’t even slow them down. She shoved her nunchaku back into her belt and pulled out her second sword. She struck out again, both swords forming an
X
in the middle of the air, and lopped off both heads, sending them bouncing back into the fog. The skeletons crumpled into a disarray of bones.

“Josh,” Sophie called again, her voice high in desperation. “Josh. Where are you?” Maybe the mummies and skeletons had gotten to him first. Maybe he was going to loom up out of the fog any minute now, eyes blank and staring, head twisted at an awkward angle. She shook her head, trying to clear the ghoulish thoughts.

Flamel’s hands burned with cold green fire, and the damp fog was rich with the odor of mint. He snapped his fingers and sent a sheet of virescent fire blazing into the fog. The fogbanks glowed emerald and aquamarine, but otherwise, the magic had no effect. Flamel next threw a small ball of green light directly in front of two lurching skeletons who loomed up before him. Fire blazed over the creatures, crisping the remains of their gray Confederate uniforms. They continued forward, bones clacking on the street, closing in on him, and there were hundreds more behind them.

“Sophie, get the Witch! We need her help.”

“But she can’t help us,” Sophie said desperately. “There’s nothing more she can do. She has no power left: she’s given everything to me.”

“Everything?” Flamel gasped, ducking beneath a swinging fist. He placed his hand on the center of the dead man’s rib cage and pushed, sending the skeleton flying back into the crowd, where it fell in a tangle of bones. “Well then, Sophie,
you
do something!”

“What?” she called. What could she do against an army of the undead? She was a fifteen-year-old girl.

“Anything!”

A mummified arm shot out of the fog and cracked her across the shoulder. It was like being hit by a wet towel.

Fear, revulsion and anger lent her strength. Right at that moment, however, she couldn’t remember anything the Witch had taught her, but then her instincts—or maybe the Witch’s imparted knowledge—took over. She deliberately allowed her anger to surge into her aura. Abruptly, the air was filled with the richness of creamy vanilla as Sophie’s aura blazed pure silver. Bringing the palm of her right hand up to her face, she blew into her cupped fingers, then tossed the captured breath into the middle of the dead. A six-foot-tall whirlwind, a miniature twister, appeared, growing up out of the ground. It sucked the dead nearest to it into its core, grinding and shattering the bones, then spitting out the splintered remains. Sophie threw a second and then a third ball of air. The three twisters danced and moved among the skeletons and mummies, cutting a swath of destruction through them. She found she could direct the twisters by simply looking in a particular direction, and they would obediently drift that way.

Suddenly, Dee’s voice echoed out of the fog. “Do you like my army, Nicholas?” The fog flattened the sound, making it impossible to locate. “The last time I was in Ojai—oh, over a hundred years ago—I discovered a marvelous little graveyard just below the Three Sisters Peaks. The town it was built alongside is long gone, but the graves and their contents remain.”

Flamel was fighting frantically as fists punched, fingernails scratched, feet kicked. There was no real strength to the skeletons’ blows or the mummies’ slaps, but what they lacked in force they made up for in numbers. There were simply too many of them. There was a bruise beginning to darken beneath his eye and a long scratch on the back of his hand. Scatty moved around Sophie, defending her while she controlled the whirlwinds.

“I don’t know how long that graveyard was in use. A couple of hundred years, certainly. I’ve no idea how many corpses it holds. Hundreds, maybe even thousands. And, Nicholas, I’ve called them all.”

“Where is he?” Flamel said through gritted teeth. “He’s got to be close—very close—to be able to control this number of corpses. I need to know where he is to do anything.”

Sophie felt a wave of exhaustion wash over her, and suddenly, one of the twisters wobbled and then vanished. The two that remained were weaving from side to side as Sophie’s physical strength ebbed. Another died, and the one that remained was rapidly losing power. This exhaustion was the price of performing magic, she realized. But she needed to keep going for just a little longer; she had to find her brother.

“We’ve got to get out of here.” Scathach caught Sophie and held her upright. The skeletal dead surged forward, and Scatty beat them back with neat, precise movements of her sword.

“Josh,” Sophie whispered tiredly. “Where’s Josh? We’ve got to find Josh.”

The fog robbed Dee’s voice of much of its emotion, but the glee in his tone was evident when he said, “And do you know what else I discovered? These mountains have been luring creatures other than humans for the past millennia. The land here is littered with bones. Hundreds of bones. And remember, Nicholas, I am, first and foremost, a necromancer.”

The bear that loomed up out of the gray fogbank was at least eight feet tall. And even though patches of fur remained on its skeleton, it was clear that it had died a long time before. The snow-white bones only emphasized its huge daggerlike claws.

Behind the bear, the skeleton of a saber-toothed tiger appeared. And then a cougar, and another bear—smaller this time, and not quite as decomposed.

“A word from me stops them,” Dee’s voice boomed. “I want the pages of the Codex.”

“No,” Flamel said grimly. “Where is he? Where is he hiding?”

“Where’s my brother?” Sophie called desperately, and then screamed as a dead hand wrapped itself in her hair. Scathach chopped it off at the wrist, but it still hung tangled in her hair like a bizarre hair clip. “What have you done with my brother?”

“You brother is considering his options. Yours is not the only side in this battle. And now, since I have the boy, all I need are the pages.”

“Never.”

The bear and the tiger charged through the crowd of bodies, brushing them aside, trampling them in their eagerness to get to the trio. The saber-toothed tiger reached them first. Its gleaming skeletal head was massive, and the two downward-jutting teeth were at least eight inches long. Flamel placed himself between Sophie and the creature.

“Hand over the pages, Nicholas, or I will loose these undead beasts on the town.”

Nicholas frantically hunted through his memory for a spell that would stop the creature. He bitterly regretted now not studying more magic. He snapped his fingers and a tiny bubble of light popped onto the ground in front of the tiger.

“Is that all you can manage, Nicholas? My, you’re weakening.”

The bubble burst and spread across the ground in a cool emerald stain.

“He’s close enough to see us,” Nicholas said. “All I need is one glimpse of him.”

The skeletal tiger’s massive right front paw stepped into the green light. And stuck. It attempted to lift its leg, but thick strands of sticky green threads connected it to the road. And now its left paw stepped into the light and stuck.

“Not quite so weak, eh, Dee?” Flamel shouted.

But the press of bodies behind the saber-toothed tiger kept pushing it forward. Suddenly, its bony legs snapped off, sending the huge beast lunging forward. Flamel managed to throw up his arms before the monster collapsed on top of him, jaw gaping, teeth wide and savage.

“Good-bye, Nicholas Flamel,” Dee called. “I’ll just take the pages from your body.”

“No,” Sophie whispered. No, it was not going to end like this. She had been Awakened, and the Witch of Endor had imbued her with all her knowledge. There had to be something she could do. Sophie opened her mouth and screamed, her aura blazing with silver incandescence.