Alchemy of Glass

by Barbara Barnett

  How could Gaelan have determined with only a small photograph that the book was a copy and not genuine? Yet, could she not distinguish a genetic anomaly by simply glancing at a photographic fingerprint? A chromatograph filter? An expert’s eye can see well beyond the obvious. One need only possess the proper eyes to see, trained and in harmony with the subject. He had that extraordinary gift—apparently, something she often lacked, especially with men.

  She gathered the remaining papers and piled them as neatly as she could next to Gaelan’s laptop on the large carved desk, which stood as a boundary between the kitchen and the sitting room. Curiosity compelled her to open the desk drawers, but they were locked. No visible key anywhere; probably somewhere in the chaos of the sitting room. The laptop was another thing; she was tempted to open it, peek inside like the voyeur she’d now become. No. She would leave it be. Besides, he would have certainly password protected it, and although she was equally certain she could puzzle it out, she would let it lie unmolested.

  The thought of remaining a moment longer in the flat grew cold. It was morbid to stay here—his tomb. The tomb of all that remained of Gaelan R. Erceldoune, a genetic enigma wrapped in a mystery. Besides, by now, Alcott was long gone, halfway across the country. Her excuse for staying had evaporated.

  As Anne grabbed her bag from the counter, she noticed a small electronic keypad. Beside it, a closed door. She tried it, but it was locked. And she had evidently triggered some sort of alarm; the keypad flashed red and emitted a piercing beep. A warning to keep out.

  CHAPTER 11

  Anne stared at the keypad until her eyes stung and vision blurred. Why the bloody hell would Gaelan need a locked room? She rolled her eyes. For his most valuable books, that’s why, you idiot! Probably had all sorts of dehumidifiers and gadgets in there to preserve the ink and paper. Little mystery there.

  But she was too curious not to see for herself. But how to get in? The chances of guessing a numeric code were infinitesimal minus a clue.

  She considered the puzzle. Gaelan had tasked her with disposing all his possessions, had he not? Bequeathed the bloody lot to her, so the code would likely be found somewhere within the papers his solicitor had sent her. Simple enough. But the papers were back at Simon’s house. And she was here. Now.

  A challenge. A diversion. Exactly what she needed.

  Did she really know Gaelan well enough to figure it out? That was the real game, wasn’t it? Unlikely, but worth a shot.

  Firstly, the passcode likely would be something only he would understand. Something unexpected, but not impossible to remember. Not random, but obscure enough to seem so.

  She brewed a cup of coffee, breathing in the brew’s rich citrusy cocoa notes. What did you love, Gaelan Erceldoune? What amused you? Gave you joy? Is that the secret place where the password lies? His books. Of course.

  She scanned through his several massive bookcases. He’d ordered the volumes by subject: alchemy, astronomy, chemistry, pharmacopeias from at least five eras, none more modern than the nineteenth century. History, Holmes—Conan Doyle—and A.C. Danforth aka Simon Bell. Mathematics.

  The code was numeric, but not likely the obvious: address, phone number, birthdate . . . She smiled. She had no idea of that one. And the year . . . ?

  Maybe she was wrong, and the code was entirely random and ever changing, which would render the lock impossible to open without the key, and she was completely wasting her time trying to puzzle it out on her own.

  One more scan of the shelves before giving it up. Two shelves of mathematics books caught her eye. They were perfectly arranged just inside the lip of the shelf except for . . . a single volume, A very, very old volume, turned on its side, “Liber Abaci” engraved in gold on its spine. This was silly. Useless. What or who the bloody hell was a Liber Abaci?

  Not Liberace, the pianist, but two words. And among the mathematics, not music, books. Music, mathematics . . . connected, she’d once learned from a maths prof. A bit of a reach, but . . .

  She withdrew the volume and opened it to the first page, half expecting the door to mysteriously open as she did. The text was in Latin, which, she reckoned, Gaelan could read with the fluency of primary school English. Was Gaelan playing with her? A farewell gift to her, conjured even in the depths of his despair? Had he found some delight teasing her with a puzzle he never might have imagined she’d find? Of course he hadn’t. When would he have found the time? Down to Earth, girl! She glanced at the door. Still closed. Back to reality.

  There was something about the book. She knew it. Perhaps a clue within it for him, unwritten—a reminder of the code. Like a string around his finger.

  She pushed a button on her phone. “Look up . . .” She glanced at the book’s spine to be sure. “Search Liber Abaci on the Web.”

  “Liberace . . . more than three million citations. Twentieth-century American pianist. Biography . . .”

  Fucking useless electronic so-called wizard! “Cancel.” Old-school time. She slid her finger around the keyboard, annoyed when the autocorrect insisted she’d meant to type ‘Liberace.’”

  Finally. “Liber Abaci. Landmark mathematics text by thirteenth-century mathematician and philosopher Leonardo of Pisa, also known as Fibonacci.”

  Fibonacci. Of course. That name, she recognized. His brilliant numeric sequence that ordered all the natural universe, from the sunflowers that grew out her window back home to the most distant galaxy in the night sky.

  That would be perfectly Gaelan, would it not? Obscure medieval mathematical treatises. She glanced over at the keypad. Hah! Not so hard to figure out, are you, Mr. Erceldoune?

  Now to test the hypothesis. She knew the first few numbers by heart: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8. What was next? A prime, that much she remembered. Thirteen? The sum of the last two numbers produced the next in the sequence. Five plus eight? Thirteen, then twenty-one.

  That Gaelan Erceldoune was a polymath, she’d already guessed. She’d seen first-hand his incisive analytical skill at languages and chemistry. Try as she might to follow Gaelan’s thought process as he’d deciphered the healing book, she’d always been paces behind him with no real chance at catch-up.

  She tried the first several numbers, pausing after each. She’d no idea how many numbers he’d programmed into the lock, much less the combination. It beeped and blinked red after the fifth digit. So . . . five. But which five? And how many tries would she have until a lockout code required resetting the lock? Then she’d be screwed.

  One more attempt. All she’d risk. Occam’s razor. The simplest answer would be to try the first two adjacent numbers that would make five digits. She did the sums in her head. Eighty-nine plus one hundred forty-four. Eight, nine, one, four, four. Fingers poised over the keys, she held her breath a moment before entering the digits. The LED glowed yellow, then green, and then the purr of electronic tumblers giving way. Small victories.

  The door opened automatically into a narrow room bathed in a red glow that reminded her of photography class, silver nitrate and spirals of exposed camera film—back before everything went digital.

  Anne pushed a button on the wall, and bright white light flooded the room, reflecting off the chrome and stainless steel of a long laboratory bench lined with chemicals, equipment, and a large, expensive, microscope fixed with a camera. An old-school centrifuge sat beside it. In the corner, a small incubator set to thirty-seven degrees Celsius. Sterile swabs and pipettes, Vacutainers and disposable syringes, all neatly arranged in small storage drawers.

  In the kitchen fridge, a covered bin containing stains, reagents, and all the other fixings needed for T-banded karyotyping. Mr. Erceldoune had set up for himself a nicely outfitted but basic DIY genetics lab, not a complex thing to do. With it, he could accomplish little more than a university first-year laboratory exercise: collect a blood sample, spin it down in hypotonic solution, treat with colchicine to freeze the mitotic chromatids in metaphase, put them on a slide, stain with Geimsa, and snap a photo for
posterity. Why go to all that bother? Why, indeed? Undoubtedly trying to understand something about his genetic makeup. What made him . . . immortal?

  Anne began opening drawers and cabinets in search of more clues. Voila. A file folder and an old-fashioned green-flecked data notebook. And a stack of human karyotype images, each dated and a year apart. She removed the first image, examining the chromosome banding. Well executed, but primitive. The banding was clear enough, but . . . there were others; he’d used several different techniques. Some she recognized, a few she didn’t.

  Another folder, more karyograms, more sophisticated scans, but these he never could have accomplished with the equipment here. They’d required radioactive dyes, special scopes, and cameras.

  He would have needed help, but from whom? Gaelan didn’t seem the type to trust very many people, and besides, how would they explain the results if they demonstrated in living color the genetic anomaly that was Gaelan Erceldoune? He’d never put himself in that position.

  Anne held an image beneath a magnifier light. There was something odd, not in the banding but in the structure of the chromosome itself. Yes, the telomeres were elongated. She’d expected as much. Not a complete surprise in someone whose tissue regenerated so quickly.

  But there was something else—differences in one image to the next. Artifacts? Mistakes in the preparation of the slides? A bad sample? The mistakes of an amateur—a talented amateur, but . . . She picked up a grease marker from the bench and circled the regions of concern. She’d take a closer look later.

  The genetic makeup of a man half a millennium old in her hands. What a find! And no wonder he’d kept it hidden behind lock and key. Along with the blood sample he’d left with her, and the notes for the ouroboros book he’d so carefully written out for her use, she could write an important text. A landmark work. Reinvent her career . . . But not yet. Not until she was certain Gaelan Erceldoune really was dead. All was fair game after that.

  She rifled through the pages of the notebook, looking for the name of whoever helped Gaelan with his experiments. Eureka! A business card. Dr. Dana Spangler, Department of Medical Genetics, Northwestern University. Bingo! Anne would ring her up first thing.

  A forty-dollar rideshare later, she was home, back at Simon’s, too spent to trudge up the stairs.

  PRESENT DAY, SCOTLAND

  CHAPTER 12

  Gaelan held the glass piece in his hand, staring at it from every angle, running a thumb along the smooth surface. It cannot be. It could not be that glass piece. Logic dictated the impossibility that a small piece of glass, missing since 1893, lost in Chicago, should turn up now, here. In Scotland. Yes, it was a teardrop quarry. And opalescent. And about the right size for it.

  The piece had gone missing halfway through the Columbian Exposition, and Gaelan had searched the grounds for hours, for days, before giving it up as lost forever.

  The quarry was warm in his hand despite the spring chill; held up to the sun, the full range of its colors, their depth—the entire spectrum held captive—bursting to escape. Color merged into color, light into light, the glass fluid, yet solid. White into turquoise into cobalt; from a different perspective, blood orange swirled iridescent into red and back to white.

  He’d crafted it as something extraordinary, the process taking him days of effort in his workroom to be worthy of her, worthy of the stained-glass panel he’d designed as a memorial to her. An image of how he’d known her, not when she lay bleeding on the apothecary floor when they’d first met, but as he beheld her the first time, he witnessed her genuine delight. Made her smile with the gift of a simple glass bauble.

  Its very existence, here, now, added much fuel to his gnawing belief that none of this was real. A mad fantasy conjured of a broken mind, random flashes of memory, a conflation of four hundred–something years of experience, with just enough reality to make him doubt his disbelief.

  Only two months earlier, he’d retrieved from storage the original favrile glass quarries to recreate the panel, an exact duplicate of the original. Remake the missing opalescent piece to replace the one lost and complete the work. He never finished it.

  Gaelan weighed the teardrop in his hand, turned it over, scrutinizing it. He could be wrong and this was simply what it appeared to be. A peculiar, interesting piece of glass, fragment of a stained-glass window, smoothed over time and the elements.

  Likely thousands of them lay scattered about the field, bits and pieces of the elaborate windows that once adorned the Dernwode House buildings. Crafted by the Quhawme Brethren who’d lived there, who taught Gaelan the craft in the first place. He’d studied each quarry each window, transported into the intricacies and workmanship. Magic, but not. Solid, but not. Fluid, but not liquid.

  What an insane, romantic notion that the teardrop should materialize thousands of miles away, here, in a place he could not be, reading the ramblings of a man he’d known, dead now nearly a century. What additional evidence did he need of his derangement?

  He should hurl the bloody thing against the stones. Watch it refuse to shatter. Prove it all an illusion. The slimmest of doubts stayed his hand.

  Instead, Gaelan pocketed the piece of glass and pushed himself up, inhaling the clean Borders air deep into his lungs. Several boulders and large flat stones were scattered among the sparse, dry grass of the large barren field. They fit together well enough to craft a rather rickety bench, yet it was a bit of a physics experiment to locate the exact balance spot where he might sit without toppling the entire thing. Placing the Conan Doyle papers beside him, Gaelan welcomed the bracing chill of the Borders morning.

  Why could he not remember getting here? He had no recollection of anything from the moment he drank the poison.

  A conundrum. A riddle to be solved if Gaelan had any hope of . . . Hope of what? Going back to Anne? Living a normal life? Returning to the status quo from which he’d only just escaped?

  What if, and without knowing how, he’d survived the poison, mind intact, and found his way to Dernwode House? Improbable, yes. But was it impossible?

  Gaelan turned back to the Conan Doyle.

  I freely admit I have for all these years been obsessed with finding this truth, which has so eluded humanity in all but minstrelsy and legend. And up until now, I have left open the possibility I have been wrong, welcoming all naysayers and sceptics, no matter their opinion of me, including my dear friend Mr. Harry Houdini. Ah, Houdini, I so deeply regret that our friendship has been a tragic casualty of this disagreement.

  I have placed within the pages of this document a small piece of glass, which will, I hope, find its way to you, dear reader, and not erode with time. I do not know how—or why—but I do know this far-from-simple piece of glass is a device to gain entry into their world—the world of the fairies. It is a key, if you will, through a portal of some sort. And it is why I so carefully stashed these items safe within the walls of this ancient structure. It is my proof that the fairy world exists alongside our own.

  When I have held this small glass bauble secure in my hand, I am transported, as if by magic, to their realm. To see it, to experience it. To dwell amongst them in their most fantastical environs. A genuine gift. But once the device—for that it is—is set down or placed it in my waistcoat pocket, I no longer am in the Otherworld, but once again find myself in a dank and lonely catacombs.

  How very like Conan Doyle to perceive mystery in even the simplest object. But a key, and to the “otherworld”? No wonder Conan Doyle had stashed the papers in a place no one would find them.

  Gaelan first met Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on a cold London night in January in 1902, dragged to a dinner party by Simon Bell. Already in a black mood, Gaelan had no patience that night to be quizzed about his surname and its connection to the fairy folk and their otherworldly domain. But Conan Doyle had been insistent.

  And yes, Gaelan had been provocative, drawing Conan Doyle into an argument impossible to win by being truthful about his past. All Gaelan could
do was deny and evade every assertion.

  Conan Doyle, the keen journalist, was hot on the trail of proof. The existence of fairies. Conan Doyle believed Gaelan knew more than he admitted. And based upon only his unusual surname.

  Conan Doyle pursued Gaelan through polite correspondence for years afterward andGaelan refused to be pulled into the endeavor. He knew too much, and Conan Doyle was too clever not to perceive even the slimmest shred of connection—a risk Gaelan was unwilling to take if it meant exposure.

  The light began to dim as the sun slipped behind a cloud. High above, a single red kite swooped and dived, seeking its prey, its magnificent wingspan stretched across the sapphire sky mighty as a fighter jet, silent, majestic. Free.

  It glided lower and lower, spotting dinner, a white-gray hare loping in great strides across the field until it disappeared into a stand of trees. The kite, denied, soared higher once again, altering its flight path as it scissored its long tail, until it, too vanished into the hills.

  Their world is far, far flung from what I expected; they are not a wee, wee folk, nor green, nor winged like a butterfly, but quite human in their way. And quite tragic, from what little I’ve overheard them discuss amongst themselves. I can see them, hear them, have so far been unable to interact with them directly, which grieves me.

  Before the end of my journey, I would so like to meet the Rhymer. Lord Thomas Learmont of Ercildoune. After all, these are his ancestral lands, and quite nearby in Earlston sits his tower. Legend tells us the fairy queen endowed him with life immortal. And local lore professes the Rhymer yet dwells beneath the three hills of Eildon, not far from where I have placed this document.