Alchemy of Glass

by Barbara Barnett

  “But—”

  “You know the ‘but.’ There’s not one EMT, not one nurse, not one tech or doc who’d been in contact with him believes that story. Plenty who were there know it’s all BS. All I know is, a lot of bonuses and raises being given out to those folks. Like it’s Christmas. And it’s not. Christmas, I mean. To keep it quiet.”

  “Maybe the samples went missing because someone was careless. Full stop. Recorded the wrong number . . . Didn’t write something down . . . maybe they were destroyed and never recorded. A million reasons. It happens.”

  “Yeah. It happens, but not often—at least not here, it doesn’t. And our biowaste recycler is the best in the business. No. I think someone stole them. I think the big, convenient suspect is your former company.”

  “Transdiff Genomics? In the UK? They’d have to have fabulously long arms to manage that one.” He wasn’t entirely wrong—if Transdiff were still in business. Which they were not. “Would it not take quite an elaborate conspiracy to carry it off? And from long distance? Not to mention, they no longer exist in any meaningful way.”

  “Usually our recyclers take it all out of our hands. Routine pickup. But we’d—”

  And there it is. She heard it in his voice. “You’d set aside Miracle Man’s tissue.” For future use. Lovely. “And someone made off with it. I’m shocked! Simply shocked! Stealing from the thieves! What is medicine coming to these days? And you still haven’t answered the question—what has any of that to do with me?”

  “Like I said, you were on the team.”

  “For a day at best. At any rate, you’ve come to the wrong player, Dr. Samuelson. And I’ve no intention of getting involved.”

  “You are anyway, so just the heads-up for now. Look, I’m trying to be collegial. Just in case they call. No need to jump down my back. Hey, they might not even call. Since you’re . . . where . . . ? London?”

  Loud, baroque chimes filled the air, reverberating through the two-story foyer. Anne jumped at the unexpected clamor. The doorbell. Fuck! She pulled the robe closer about her.

  “Yes. London,” she answered with no hesitation. “I have to run. Someone’s at the door.” She clicked off and padded barefoot to the door, carrying a dry set of clothing. “Coming! I . . . Can you wait a moment?” she called through the door as she traded the bathrobe for jeans and a T-shirt.

  She opened the door, immediately regretting it.

  The man leaning against the carved lintel looked exactly like his photograph. Wild salt and pepper hair curled down to his collar, framing a tanned angular face and narrow eyes, the color of smoke. Though he was taller than she imagined.

  “Dr. Anne Shawe?” He extended a large hand. “When you didn’t return my call, I figured it was easier if I just drop by than play telephone tag until one of us gave up or gave in. I had a pretty good hunch you weren’t going to let me get two words out before you hung up anyway, so—”

  “I’m . . . um—” How the hell did Preston Alcott find her in the United States, much less in an out-of-the-way suburb north of Chicago?

  “I hope you’ll forgive the chutzpa of employing a little technological abracadabra. Gotta love what you can do with GPS!”

  Of course. She had used her cellphone. Not exceedingly difficult, she’d imagine, for a communications technology genius to triangulate her location. Fucking hell. Was there no privacy at all, anymore?

  “I actually don’t. Love it. How dare you violate my privacy? In the UK there are laws—”

  “I dare because I have to. It’s how I’ve gotten ahead, and what I gotta do now. So, forgive the intrusion, but I really have to talk to you, and didn’t know any better way to make that happen. And quickly. To be honest, if I’d pinpointed you in Europe, I’m not sure I’d have gone to the trouble, at least not today, but since you were only a short skip by corporate jet—”

  His drawl reminded her of Texas cowboys and her dad’s obsession with American Western television programs. She despised every bloody syllable of it emerging between Preston Alcott’s lips, no matter however much cultivated affability exuded from every pore. “I’m sorry to have wasted your time. I’ve no interest any project, from you or anyone else right now.”

  “You really should be more mindful of what you read on the Web. A hellhole of made up stories, alternative facts. Fake news, haven’t you heard? I know you went straight to the shrine of Google and looked me up. Learned all sorts of vile bits about me. Very few of them are accurate. Or true.”

  “You trolling my Internet usage as well?”

  “No. Common sense. I know I would, if the roles were reversed. Which is why I chose not to wait for you to hang up on me, buy a new phone, change your number, and disappear back into the UK. So. May I come in?”

  SCOTLAND, PRESENT DAY

  CHAPTER 8

  Dernwode House. A place not in existence for centuries. Yet, inexplicably, there he was. But how?

  And how had it taken so long to realize it? The sconces should have given it away immediately had they not been completely out of context.

  But the stairway. That stairway. The entrance to the monastery cellarium, its network of caves.

  Gaelan remembered the morning he’d carved into the bottom stair his family’s sigil—the single red rose of House Learmont. And now, more than four hundred years later, there it was, exactly where he’d engraved it.

  Two hypotheses vied for dominance in Gaelan’s mind. Either he’d traveled the distance from the coast to the Scottish Borders completely unaware—or he was in the throes of full-on delusion. Neither one a welcome proposition.

  Three hundred miles through rough terrain from the northwest coast to Eildon. This particular place, so hidden within the jaw of two hills, had been near impossible to find before it was flattened centuries ago. He’d never have managed it, much less with no recollection? Had he walked? Driven? Hitchhiked? On foot it would have been days and days of travel. Dazed and injured? Much longer. More than improbable.

  He was less fond of the more likely scenario. Hallucinations and flashbacks were nothing new to Gaelan. The torture at Bedlam. His father’s execution. Visions of Mama. Eleanor. Caitrin and wee Iain? The healing goddess Airmid. She’d come to him too, time to time.

  Gaelan’s mind had always provided a fertile landscape for such horrors and delights to conjure from his unconscious at will. To terrify or soothe. Yet, his mind had never before ventured here, to this place, neither in dream nor vision.

  Yet, why would it not, other than it hadn’t? And why not now, at long last, a dream of safety he’d not felt for hundreds of years? Why not this place? And who knew what havoc the poison had wrought?

  Ah, the poison . . . Was this his death, and this his singular heaven?

  For the moment, Gaelan was satisfied to avoid the question and go along for the ride—wherever it took him. Not that he had much choice. And that meant, for now, up the staircase and out of the stale air of the cellarium.

  The narrow, steep stairs spiraled up toward ground level, and Gaelan stayed close to the retaining wall, a small lantern his meager guide up the pitted and cracked stones.

  The hospice Dernwode House had been notorious in its day. A place of mystery, its black-hooded brethren but phantoms, the remnant few of a once-grand monastery at Soutra, most of whom had been executed long before Gaelan was born. Yet, a small band survived, said the legend, haunting the Borders in perpetuity. Gaelan believed it a tale perpetrated by the brethren themselves as means to an end—keep the secret and continue their practices of medicine and scholarship. Work and study.

  Yet, Dernwode, even in its veil of secrecy, became welcome sanctuary for those in need of its generosity, and the skill of the monks, whose medical skills were far more advanced than any known in Britain. Skills gladly offered, but only on the promise of absolute discretion beyond the hospice walls, well sequestered within the arms of the Eildon Hills.

  For Gaelan, Dernwode House had been sanctuary and more.

&nb
sp; A third of the way up the stairs, Gaelan was breathless, drenched in sweat. The trek up to the surface was more arduous than he recalled; his injuries must have been worse than he’d imagined. He needed to rest.

  Sitting on a mud-caked stair, he raked filthy fingers through his equally filthy hair and closed his eyes, elbows on his knees. The voice of his tutor Brother Hugh echoed softly through the dark, reminding Gaelan of the first time he’d been down these stairs as a lad of twelve and only just arrived. Turn of a new century, 1600.

  “We are a house of healing, a house of learning and work. A hospice to those who have need of us, who will find our door, no matter how hidden we are—or whom we shall find, as we did you, my lad.

  “Your dear papa and grandfather we considered great friends and allies and could never forsake. We worried for your safety after the execution, lad, and grieved the loss of them, both bright lights in the darkness of ignorance, which flourishes yet upon these shores.”

  Two years it had been after King James burnt his father alive on the pyre. In the midst of winter the Dernwode brethren had found Gaelan half-frozen and barely breathing, nearly dead of starvation, only a short distance from the monastery gates.

  Two years living beneath the oppressive thumb of his mother’s father in the cruel emptiness that followed the horror of that morning, which still preyed upon him four centuries on. He had little choice but to carefully pack all that remained of his father’s work and flee.

  Gaelan sighed and the memory disintegrated, as a large spider crept silently into the periphery of his vision, ambling its way along the wall. Another joined it, and another after that. Soon, they covered the entire wall, weaving away at a complex web. Gaelan blinked, and they’d vanished.

  Oh, for fuck’s sake.

  He looked up, noticing now, not so high above, the orange-black of early dawn. Or was it twilight? With no watch, Gaelan had no idea.

  Time to push on.

  The stairs were ever-more eroded and cracked the higher he climbed, many of them separated by gaping crevasses. He paused before a particularly wide gap, wiping away the sweat dripping into his eyes. Twenty-one more steps to the top.

  The land whereupon Dernwode House stood had once been part of his own family’s estates. Centuries earlier, long before even his grandfather was born, House Learmont forged an eternal bond with the black-hooded monks of Soutra. Lord Thomas Learmont de Ercildoune, poet, philosopher, prophet, friend to the fairy folk, keeper of the great book of healing.

  Thomas had shared the book with the monks—Augustinian Canons—of Soutra. Airmid herself had insisted upon it after releasing him from his seven years’ captivity in the thirteenth century, or so said the legend.

  “They will understand how to interpret these cures,” she’d explained to Thomas, who explained it to his sons and their sons after until the story was passed on to Gaelan, not by his father but by his tutor Brother Hugh. On these very stone steps.

  “The Quhawme Brethren shall for you and your heirs ever be friend and ally. No matter what comes to pass. We are all that remain of the Black Canons, who long ago dwelled here, but we dare never admit it. To any. This be Dernwode House now, and we but mere lay folk here, who do endeavor to continue their goodly works.”

  Gaelan departed Dernwode—all that remained of the Soutra legacy—after three years, not to return for more than two hundred after that. By then, the monks and their legacy were long gone, the hospice consumed by tall grasses and dense woods. There’d been little remaining of its grounds, its buildings and gardens.

  The amber glow of the lantern reflected against the retaining wall, drawing Gaelan’s eye to something just above his head, just barely visible beneath centuries of grime. He moved closer, boosting himself up to the next stair to take a closer look.

  It required nearly half the case of water bottles Gaelan had found to clear away the centuries of mossy filth. By the time he finished, he was drenched with sweat; he gripped the wall for support as a wave of dizziness fell upon him and leaned his head against the cool, rough stones for a moment’s respite.

  Holding the lantern close, he saw it clearly. An inscription carved deep into the wall and clearly the work of an experienced artisan—of a time very long past.

  “’Twas there above a beam o’ light danced owre them mair bonnie than starshine. Wi’ green scarves on, but ane that rade foremost, and that ane was a good deal larger than the lave wi’ bonnie lang hair, bun’ about wi’ a strap whilk glinted like stars. They rade on braw wee white naigs, wi’ unco lang swooping tails, an’ manes hung wi’ whustles that the win’ played on. This an’ their tongue when they sang was like the soun’ of a faraway psalm.”

  Gaelan knew this story well; had heard it over and over as a boy—this telling of the Rhymer’s abduction away to Elfenland. To Elfenhame. The fae, their queen, and her court on parade. Visible, but only in the blink of an eye, a shadow in the periphery, but no more than that—and only then to those who knew how to see them.

  The inscription glowed in the amber light, penetrating through the centuries, the letters dancing, as if they themselves were the fae, arrived from another plane.

  Gaelan’s ancestor was called by many names in legend. Lord Thomas Learmont. True Thomas. Thomas the Rhymer, borne away by the fae queen Airmid and kept as her consort for seven years. Abducted quite near this very place they rode through on the hallowe’en.

  The Scots inscription nudged at the far reaches of Gaelan’s mind and lapped at the slipping bonds of Gaelan’s wakefulness. Before him, in the peculiar light of the stairway, marched the fae, dressed not in green velvets but in rags of faded color, not on white steeds with braided manes and decorated tails but on foot, slow and weary. Their song not a psalm but a plea for help. They stared at him from within the vision, gazes dark, desperate.

  Gaelan blinked and they vanished. Desolate, alone, frustrated that the poison had not, evidently, worked—or worked so strangely as to drive him insane—he’d had enough. Powerless to do anything about it, he wept.

  Tears cascaded down his face unabated, his hands, his now-filthy shirt, his jeans, bathing him of everything that had transpired in these past several days. Or had it been weeks by now? The last century. The past five. Of regret and revenge. He wept until his eyes were dry and the tears dried to caked streaks as sleep claimed him.

  A single ray of sunlight split the dark space of the stairway. Enough to wake him. Gaelan stood, stepping into its unexpected warmth. His mood had not improved.

  “Enough!” he shouted up through the stairway until it reverberated all around him, disembodied voices. Until he was hoarse, and his throat was as dry as burnt paper. “Enough!” Until no sound had the energy to emerge from between his parched lips.

  He pounded on the stairway wall until his fists bled. Ignoring the pain, and the itch of blood trailing down his forearms, Gaelan again leaned his head against the cool stone, exhausted, spent of all reserves.

  A block of cracked masonry disintegrated in his hands when, finally, he pushed away, and a large granite block popped out of its place in the wall. No matter how hard he tried to force it back into position, it would not budge an inch.

  Now what?

  Gaelan edged the heavy block from the wall, resting it carefully on a step, and dusted off his hands. What the hell had lodged itself behind the block? He squinted into the opening, the dim lantern light no more help than the scant rays of sun filtering through from above.

  A petrified rodent? Vines? A jug of five-hundred-year-old rum?

  Now that would be worth the effort!

  Groping far into the breach, Gaelan located the offending object. A sheaf of papers bound up in a leather cover, secured with braided cords and a heavy strap, brittle with age. But not even decades, centuries, of grime and dust, moss and mildew could completely mask the richness of the tooled leather.

  He’d been an antiquities dealer too long to risk opening something ancient and fragile in the dark, difficult stairway
. Curiosity tugged at him, recharging his flagged energy, and he trudged up the remaining stairs, mindful of the increasingly fractured stone, finally reaching the top.

  The midmorning sun cut like a laser, too bright after however much time he’d spent below ground. The cool cleanliness of a spring morning replaced the oppressive, dark chill of the cellarium. The fresh air swathed him, and the forest perfume wafted down from the hills, swaddling him against the dark spirits that had just before threatened to suffocate him.

  Holding it up to the light, Gaelan examined the cover. The leather tooling was crude, certainly not professional. A primitive sketch. Random lines. Rubbing away more of the grime revealed no useful clues about the document’s age or contents. It was old, yet not so much as Gaelan imagined a document hidden within the subterranean wall of a medieval structure might be.

  The handwriting was neat. Quill.

  First of May 1930

  It is no figment of my imagination, and despite what my critics write about me and my penchant for the fairies and their world, I must here finally assert they are all wrong. I am at last vindicated! There is no mistake, and I am proven no fantasist. I have seen them with mine own eyes, and have acquired hereabouts—or from your perspective, dear reader, thereabouts—validation of all I have for so long believed true, though perhaps not exactly as I’d imagined. Sadly so, I am sorry to report, for their condition—their world, just a hair’s breadth beyond our own—is far from what is fancied. However, after writing for so many years, indeed, most of this decade, of others’ personal encounters, I am happy at last to give in these pages my very own accounting.

  You may think I do not know the Cottingly fairies are but a hoax. A bloody good one, but a hoax nevertheless. Yet, despite my knowledge of it, you may further wonder why I did not expose it, and, indeed, did embrace the very idea of it. Most assuredly, it was neither pride nor vanity—an old man refusing to say outright he has been fooled, and so soundly at that. For the fairies do exist, real as you and I, and I did not wish to harm my own case by dispelling the Cottingly prank.