The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane (34 page)

“I was…” Connie began, her mind attempting to skip ahead of her tongue. But why would the witch-bottle spell have summoned
him
?

She watched her advisor poking through her grandmother’s dining room with detached interest, saying, “So this is the old bird’s house that you’ve been so bothered with,” and rejected the obvious conclusion as impossible. Chilton was a distinguished, ambitious old academic. He wrote books, he delivered lectures, he smoked a pipe, for God’s sake. He was concerned with truth, he said, with reputation. He was ambitious, yes, and single-minded in his desire. But he was no poisoner.

The logical voice that Connie had pushed away now screamed at her in her mind.
Alchemy! Compounds!
Chilton was desperate to get ahold of the physick book to further his own alchemical research. He had tried to prod her using praise and the promise of professional success. Then he had tried dogging her as she hunted for the book in the Harvard library.

Connie stared at her advisor, her eyes growing wider as the logical chain began to form in her mind. Chilton wanted the book for himself. He had to force her to find it for him. And if he knew what the book was used for, then what better motivation could he supply?

Connie’s hand flew to the manuscript, horror dawning across her face. “It was you,” she said, voice hollow as she realized that Chilton had been willing to risk Sam’s very life in service to his ambition. “You’re the one.”

“Hmmm,” Chilton said, inspecting the portrait hanging on the far wall of the dining room, of the broad-foreheaded, wasp-waisted young woman, a small dog just now visible in the shadow under her arm. “Did you know, Miss Goodwin, that ancient Arabian alchemists believed in the doctrine of the two principles? Would you happen to know what those two principles were?”

He looked over his shoulder at her, expectantly. She stared at him, un-comprehending, sick with revulsion.

“No? All metals, they thought, consisted of different proportions of mercury, to correspond to the moon, and sulfur, for the sun. Mercury bears the essential metallic property—or quicksilver, I should say, as Mercury is actually its planetary name—while sulfur provides the combustibility. They weren’t referring quite literally to quicksilver and common sulfur, of course, but to the metaphorical qualities of each. The aesthetics of substance.” He cocked an eyebrow. “Great ones for metaphor, the alchemists,” he added, circling around the dining table, past the portrait. Connie moved around the opposite side of the table, gathering the manuscript to her chest, balled fists clutching handfuls of herbs that had been lying on the table.

“To these two fundamental elements that make up all metals, a distinguished man named Paracelsus added a third: salt, which he thought accounted for…” Chilton seemed to grope for the correct word.

“Earthiness,” he finished. “Fixity. Groundedness. So, metal, fire, and earth. The three fundamental elements which, in pure form, are the building blocks of all reality. The original alchemical recipe for gold brought together the very purest forms of mercury and sulfur: the liquid—metallic, the difficult to contain—together with the explosive—the yellowish, the stuff of demons. And salt, for stability. For tangibility, even wholesomeness. One might also think of these three elemental forms as representative of the spirit”—he ticked off each on a finger—“the soul, and the body. Like many
folkloric, magical, even”—here he arched an eyebrow meaningfully at Connie—“
religious
systems, the alchemists put great stock in multiples of three. Naturally, the central problem facing the alchemists was one of purity. How to refine a substance into its purest—its
best
—most elemental form.”

A wicked smile spread across his face as he continued. “Of course, when added in the correct proportion to a supply of drinking water, say, the effects of these basic elements on all three aspects of a man’s person can be quite…pronounced. Even lethal. Particularly antimony. Its alchemical symbol is an orb with a cross on top of it—the same symbol used to denote royalty. The circle at the center of the glyph for the philosopher’s stone. And”—he chuckled—“a rather close relative of arsenic.”

Connie thought back to Sam’s description of the water in his cooler at the church, how it had had a metallic taste. She remembered that no one seemed to know who had called the ambulance that day. And then she saw Sam falling, his leg shattering against the hard back of the wooden pew, heard the wet crunch of his body crushed by gravity, and her vision clouded with red.

“Why?” she demanded, her voice growing stronger. “Why would you harm
him
? I nearly had the book. I was going to give it to you.”

“Ah,” Chilton said, his hand roaming over an earthenware teapot. He lifted it up to the thin light in the window, flared his nostrils with disapproval, and set it down again. Then he gestured to the book that she was grasping to herself. “As a matter of fact, you apparently
have
the book. And I don’t recall being informed.”

He watched her, but she said nothing. Chilton turned to gaze out the window over the garden, his hands folded behind his back. When his eyes were averted she quickly began to shred the herbs she held in her hands, ripping the stems and leaves apart.

“I did try to encourage you,” he said, his back still to her. “I told you what an important find it would be for your own work. I even”—his voice took on a wounded cast, as if he could not bear the disappointment that she had brought upon him—“invited you to let me present you to my colleagues
at the Colonial Association. To share in my triumph. I have been grooming you, my girl. At great sacrifice to my own busy schedule, it must be said. Preparing you to rise to the very top of your field, under my tutelage.” He heaved a woeful sigh. “The conference, alas, is at the end of the month. And you have brought me nothing.”

While he spoke, Connie closed her eyes, recalling the instructions that had been written on the page in the manuscript. The text read:

I can’t do that
. Connie thought. I can’t kill him! Her hands scrabbled through the herbs that were scattered across the tabletop, sifting the dead leaves through her fingers.
I don’t know what to do!
her inner voice whimpered, but she locked it away in a disused corner of her mind and concentrated on the work. A growl rumbled from under the table.

Connie opened her eyes and saw that Chilton was still gazing out of the dining room window, shaking his head and tsking.

“A shame,” he was saying. “I had had such high hopes. As you have probably gathered, I am on the point of achieving the one true recipe for the philosopher’s stone. A discovery that mankind has been awaiting for thousands of years.” His hand rested again on the earthenware teapot, tightening its grip. “In point of fact, I have already promised to sell the rights to the formula, and for not a small sum, either. The philosopher’s stone is not only
real, but likely an ancient name for an arcane arrangement of carbon atoms, able to bring purity to any disordered molecular system in everything from physics to biochemistry. All the metaphors and riddles in the alchemical texts suggested it. Valueless, and all around us! Unknown, and yet known to all. Carbon is the basis of all life on earth, after all. In varying degrees of purity and arrangement, it assembles into coal, diamond, even the human body. It is like God’s Tinkertoy.” The hand wrapped around the teapot squeezed, and a crack suddenly shot through the pot’s side with a snap.

His laughter stopped abruptly as an image assembled itself before Connie’s eyes, of Chilton sitting at his desk in the Harvard history department, his ear pressed to a telephone receiver, his face purpling as a male voice said,
Well, of course I was interested, but you didn’t really expect me to take it to the board, did you
? The voice broke into gasps of laughter as Chilton’s upper lip quavered, and a pencil clutched in his fist snapped in two as he uttered,
I just need a little more time, dammit!
Through the telephone the laughing voice said,
Face it, Manny. You’ve got nothing for me,
just as the image pulled apart like oiled tissue and Connie found herself back in her grandmother’s hall.

Chilton continued steadily. “I plan to reveal the formula at the Colonial Association, bringing history and science together at last. And then I can finally stop being little more than a glorified schoolteacher.” He spat out this last word with surprising venom. “But unfortunately, a crucial element is missing. One that I am unable to define. A process, I am reasonably sure. A final step.” His eyes met hers, and she saw in his face the dark, dull throb of desperation.

“Let us say that I, too, needed to broaden my source base,” Chilton continued, voice growing cold. “Of course I knew you were a top-notch researcher; that’s why I admitted you to the program in the first place. But when you told me of this extant shadow book, well…” His lips drew back, bloodless and frigid. “You do surprise me, my girl. References to an original colonial-era shadow book, used by an actual witch, and the first clue found in your blessed old grandmother’s house, no less! I knew then that you would be of even greater use to me than I had anticipated.” He started to approach
the table. The growling grew louder.

Connie held his gaze, her fingers surreptitiously tearing a corner off of the mandrake root and ripping it to shreds. She did not speak. A flicker of tension twitched in her cheek. She watched him approach, her hands moving automatically through their preparations, as if they had always known what to do, leaving her consciousness free to contemplate how loathsome her advisor had become to her, how his ego and hunger for prestige had made him twisted and debased, how behind his eyes she saw a soul whose very humanity had been squashed under the impossible weight of his ambition.

“As you know, I place no faith in innate talent, Miss Goodwin,” Chilton said, his voice morphing into a snarl as he drew even closer, his hand tracing the shield back of one of the chairs tucked under the dining table.

“One cannot go skipping about, expecting one’s romantic inclinations to lead the way. No. The cornerstone of the best practice of history is effort. It is work! I had to devise a way to hasten your research, as my own meager encouragements were proving insufficient.” He paused. “At the same time, I could also ascertain if the shadow book was as powerful as I believed. A little alchemical compound in the body can confound modern medicine, but it should be no match for a true premodern physick book, particularly in the hands of a
motivated
querent.” His eyes began to gleam. “After I observed you one afternoon in the, ah, shall we say
affectionate
company of a young man, why, the idea naturally presented itself.

“And I was right,” he exclaimed, surging toward Connie. He lunged for the book that she held in her arms, grabbing ahold of her shoulders. “Give it to me,” he growled, fingers digging painfully into her flesh, his sour breath hot on her face. She screamed, twisting herself in his grip, struggling to free herself, but his weight crushed down on her, one gnarled hand prying for the book.

All at once a blurred form leapt out from under the table, enfolding Chilton’s arm in a snarling flurry. Chilton cried out in pain, dropping to his knees in an attempt to disengage his forearm from the tearing, jerking grip of the dog, who held fast to the flesh, as if killing a rat. As Chilton fell, Con
nie lunged forward, plunging her hand straight into the crackling fire to grasp the antique bottle. Its glass was so fearsomely hot it almost felt soft to the touch, her fingertips sinking into the searing gel as she lifted it from within the flames and dropped it into the waiting cauldron. It carried away a charred layer of skin from Connie’s fingers, coils of smoke drifting up from her hands as she squinted her eyes against the overweening consciousness of pain.

She lurched back to the end of the table, grasping the shredded heap of mandrake root in one raw and bleeding hand, skin sizzling at the touch of the deadly root, and flinging it toward the cauldron, where it fell with a sinister hiss, releasing a puff of oily black smoke. Meanwhile Chilton hoisted himself up with a grunt, leaning on the table. His foot shot out and connected with the dog, who let out an angry yelp as he went skidding across the floor before vanishing in the instant before he would have struck the opposite wall.

“I want it,” Chilton commanded through gritted teeth. “Give it to me. I must have it!” The sleeve of his tweed jacket and oxford shirt hung in red ribbons from the elbow, and he staggered to his feet, wrapping the trailing rags of clothing around the ripped, oozing gashes that crisscrossed his arm. He crept nearer, loops of blood falling from the shredded arm that he now held clutched to his chest.

With a quick movement, Connie pushed through the crumbled leaves and herbs on the table, her grasp moving automatically to a few stalks of stringy white flowers with broad, rough-textured leaves holding hard, waxy berries—the goldenseal. She took it up together with the nettles and crushed the stalks and flowers in her palms, naked skin screaming against the pain, and dropped them into the pot. Beneath the cauldron, the fire dodged and shimmied, flinging her and Chilton’s shadows crazily about the room.

“It won’t work for you!” Connie screamed, clutching the manuscript to herself and stepping back.

“It will! I will make it work!” he bellowed, and he reached out again with a stagger, clawing at her forearm. “It has to work! The philosopher’s stone is the conduit! It is the medium for God’s power here on earth! The
rock on which God’s church is built!”