Phoenix Falling

by Laura Bickle

  He had created this place, supported it with his magic, and it had turned on him.

  He wasn’t naive, though. He knew that they’d come for him eventually. From the view of his second-floor window, he saw the men walking down the long road to his house with torches. They had turned on him, after all he’d given them—livelihoods, houses, and this little oasis in the wilderness. How quickly they forgot. How quickly they wanted to destroy him and the home that he had built so carefully. They were invading his sanctuary, likely to loot the priceless treasures in his laboratory. In truth, they were the ones who were naive. Because there was no way he would let them have what he built.

  If he were driven out, he would take it all with him.

  It wasn’t as if he hadn’t considered running. He might have been able to flee into the wilderness, to begin again elsewhere. But Lascaris intended to play the long game. And, he would admit, he was stubborn. Why should they take what was his? He would not let his enemies gain his treasure. And he would return, one way or another, to avenge himself.

  He moved down the stairs to the first floor. All the lights were out in his house, and the human servants had disappeared. Maybe they’d even been in on it. He checked that the doors were locked and moved on to the door to the basement. He barricaded the basement door behind him and faced his alchemical laboratory for the last time.

  The athanor, the alchemical furnace, glowed red in the corner. That fire, tended by salamanders, never went out. It cast just enough light for him to see by, though he knew every feature of this place by touch. He sucked in his breath as he descended. He had, indeed, been betrayed. Some of his materials had been moved. Some items were missing. He snarled, thinking of his servants vanishing into the night with his potions and notes. Furious, he slammed his hands down on the experiment table.

  If they wanted war, he would bring war to them.

  Though some of his equipment was gone, his most recent project was fresh in his mind, his pursuit of the Great Work. He snatched a fistful of peacock feathers from a jar on a shelf and threw them in an iron bucket with a handful of raven claws. He cast in an eagle’s beak, sulfur, a nugget of gold the size and shape of a human heart, two silver coins, and thirteen fire agates. Muttering dark incantations, he added the contents of a jar of myrrh, spikenard, cinnamon, salt, quicksilver, and a capped flask he’d hidden back on a shelf. The flask had been his best effort at conjuring quintessence, the ether that moved all the unseen things in the world. He dumped the silvery contents of the flask into the bucket.

  He yanked open the door of the athanor. An unhappy salamander scuttled out and hissed at him. Looking at the fire lizard in scorn, Lascaris placed the bucket in the belly of the athanor, closed the door, and drew the symbol of quintessence on the floor before the athanor in chalk: a circle on the floor, then a triangle within it, then a square within the triangle, and another circle within the square. At the corners of the triangle, he hastily scribbled the alchemical symbols for salt, mercury, and fire. The phoenix he summoned would be drawn to magic, and he knew that he was the most magical thing in Temperance.

  “I call all the elements—air, fire, water, and earth. I summon the sylphs of the east, the salamanders of the south, the undines in the west, and the gnomes of the north. I call upon all the elemental doors to open, to bring forth the creature of quintessence, the phoenix, into this world.”

  He was conscious of the sounds of men pounding on his door upstairs. Something splintered, and boots clomped on the floors above. Something heavy was flung on the basement door, and he knew that they were coming for him—that they would get through soon. But all that sound receded behind the pounding of his heart.

  The contents of the bucket boiled over, spilling into the fire. Where it met the flame, the concoction flashed, like dynamite. The suggestion of a wing sparked into being, stretching in the heart of the athanor.

  Sweat prickled Lascaris’s brow and his heart thundered. The phoenix. It was coming. He lifted his hand to the furnace. The light was so bright he could see the bones underneath his red flesh.

  So close so close so close so . . .

  Men flooded into his basement, into his sanctuary. They grasped his arms, dragged him out of the symbol of quintessence. He fought and struggled. The bucket in the athanor spilled, pouring liquid fire on the floor in a pool of lava that ignited everything it touched. Bookshelves, papers, his table—they all began to go up in flames. But the phoenix that was nearly pulled into form was gone. The magic was spilled and ruined.

  The men surrounding him shouted at the flames. One had caught fire, and they were beating the flames out on his shirt. They began to retreat, back up the stairs, barely beyond the fire’s touch. Jars on the shelves exploded under the heat.

  Lascaris moved to crawl up the stairs, but the door was slammed shut before him, something heavy dragged before it. He slid back down the steps, crawling beneath the smoke. The basement walls were pierced by tiny windows near the ceiling, but they were too small for a man to crawl through. Fire washed up and blanketed the ceiling. There was no escape from this place. This house was going up, with him in it.

  He was going to die.

  No. He would not let them win. He could not. He crawled to a shelf and dug through its contents, coughing. The fire was climbing up, up, but that wasn’t his concern. It would not be the fire that killed him, but the smoke. A salamander basked in the fire devouring his laboratory table, and he glared at it with murderous rage. He knew that he’d lost control over the elementals in the spell, that there was no recovering it.

  He opened a box that contained a spell that he had never imagined using on himself, only his enemies: the dark mirror.

  He turned the mirror on himself as the smoke bore down on him.

  The roar of the fire and the shouts of men fell away, as if an iron door had been closed on them, shutting them out.

  And Lascaris was in darkness, a grey darkness that seethed indistinctly around him. He had no body anymore, no sense of separation of his form from the darkness. He was nothing. He could see and hear nothing, not even his own voice. He dissolved into the back of the mirror, into a limbo, accompanied by only his thoughts.

  He guessed that time passed, though he didn’t know how much. That darkness stretched forever, an infinite unwinding. He passed through periods—perhaps decades—of madness that slipped into lucidity. During those times, he hoped that the Hanged Men would return, that they would excavate the site, find the mirror. Gabriel might guess at what he’d done, if he found the mirror. If no one else came to look, then the mirror might remain in the debris of his ruined laboratory, to be filled in by rain and dirt and time. His sentence might be forever.

  The weight of time pressed down on him, and on the mirror. He imagined that the ruins of his house compacted, decomposed. Maybe someone filled it in, creating smooth land again. Water trickled through, and the earth churned, as it sometimes does. Things worked free, moving up, sideways, as holes were dug and the earth shivered. Roots of plants reached down, turning, licking water from the face of the mirror.

  At some point, he knew that the pressure of earth on the mirror caused it to fracture. He felt it like a thunderclap. He felt the shards crackling upward, toward the sky as water pushed them up, through gravel. With the thunderclap came a flash of light . . .

  . . . his spirit cast about, searching for his body. But his body was long gone, burned to ash. There was nothing to return to.

  And so, he was catapulted into the spirit world. He’d been released, but to a different hell. He found himself digging himself out of a field, surrounded by shards of mirror. His form felt insubstantial and shadowy. It took him great effort to move the clods of dirt, and when he looked at his hands, they looked like black smoke trapped under glass, the suggestion of hands, churning and transparent.

  As he stood, muddy in that familiar-looking field, he realized that he was standing at the spirit world’s reflection of his home. They were tenuously co
nnected, through all the magic he’d worked in the physical world. And the spirit world remembered all his efforts.

  His house stood here, before him, behind the iron fence. The house loomed in all its former glory, exactly as he’d built it. Which, in turn, was an exact replica of his childhood home. He had told no one this secret. He had simply made it as exquisitely perfect as he could.

  He walked through the open iron gate to the house, transfixed, his heart hammering in his chest. The cedar shingles looked freshly whitewashed. The slate roof even had the same green color that he recalled, and the ironwork the same scrolling, with roses vining around the posts. The gate closed softly behind him. He gazed in wonder at this, amazed that the spirit world remembered it as well as he had.

  He climbed the porch to find the front door ajar. He stepped inside, unsure whether he’d find his childhood home or his alchemist’s lair.

  Something moved in the parlor, to his right. He rounded the corner, and his gut twisted.

  A coffin lay in the center of the room, on a table. In the open box, his oldest sister, Addy, lay, her hands wrapped over her chest and fingers tangled in wilting violets. Her face was pale and sunken, the appearance of a corpse that had lain in a box for three days in summer. But he knew that she had just been put in, that she’d been ill for a year.

  A priest stood at the head of the coffin, reading from his Bible. His remaining family stood around the coffin. His father, his younger sister, Beth. His older brother, Dyer, had fallen ill with the consumption a month before Addy died. He was the favorite boy, and had been sent to Colorado for fresh air. The girls in his family were not so lucky. Beth coughed into her hand, and their father glared at her. She tucked her hand, covered in blood, behind her back.

  He gazed in resentment at his father, the improbably named Pleasant Lascaris, standing there with his stupid hat over his heart as if it were broken. He stepped up to his father and tried to slap the hat from his hands. But his father’s gaze didn’t register on him, and his hand slid through the felt of the hat.

  He reached for Addy in her coffin, remembering the violets he’d picked for her. His shadow-hand passed through hers. He was no more than a ghost here, in this world. Were these truly his family, or some shadows the spirit world had conjured up to punish him?

  He retreated to the front door. He found it locked. He couldn’t open it. His hands passed through the ornate doorknob. He turned to the windows. Perhaps one of them was open . . .

  . . . but they were shut. Shut and painted black. No light from outside shone within.

  It was a trap. Lascaris snarled and murmured some incantations that he thought might break the window seals, but they remained stubbornly closed. He was a fly caught in the honey of memory. He could not escape it, even as the honey rotted.

  He faced the staircase. Screwing up his courage, he climbed the steps. His gaze lingered on the scratches the coffin made on the wall, going downstairs. He shook his head and ascended the stairs, to his mother’s room.

  His parents’ bedroom stood at the end of a short hall. Feeling the trepidation of a small child, Lascaris moved over the fine carpets to his mother’s bedside.

  His mother was exactly as he remembered her. Patience Lascaris lay in her bed, eyes closed, her face glossed in sweat. Lascaris sank into a chair beside her.

  “Mother, it’s Aldus. I don’t think you can hear me,” he said. Or maybe he thought it. In this form, as a shade, he wasn’t certain. “But I remember you. I remember all of this.”

  His mother made no move. Her lips were speckled with red, and so was the handkerchief knotted in her fingers. At the bedside were some noxious concoctions that the doctor had prescribed for her. Given what Lascaris knew now about herbs and tinctures, he knew that they were useless. They were used mostly to quiet her cough and allow his father to get some sleep. In those last weeks, his mother never really woke up. She wasted away, and his father let her.

  “After I left, I searched . . . I searched for the key to eternal life,” he told her. “I was so close. So close.” He ran his shaking hands over his head. “I thought I could keep this from happening again. I thought I could complete the Great Work and conjure the Philosopher’s Stone, that magic could succeed where prayer and medicine failed.”

  He leaned forward, so close that his breath should have disturbed her hair. “And it will. It will.”

  He turned at the sound of footsteps. His father stood in the doorway, without his hat. He was reading a letter. He looked at Patience, his face showing the first signs of distress that Aldus had ever seen on his father’s face.

  His father stood over his mother’s bed. “A letter came from Colorado. Dyer . . . Dyer is dead.”

  He let the letter drop to the quilt. Patience’s fingers scrabbled weakly toward it. Pleasant walked away, down the hallway, a broken man.

  “Was it worth it?” Lascaris snarled. “You sold everything to save him. And it didn’t work!”

  Lascaris turned back to his mother. She was still, cold in her bed. Her chest no longer rose and fell.

  Anger bubbled up in him, and he walked down the hallway, after his father, but his father had vanished.

  He paused before his sister Beth’s room. Beth was as he had found her one early May morning. She’d fallen facedown on the floor, tangled in her bedspread, covered in blood. A small puddle leaked from her mouth. She was not yet fifteen, had not even had the chance to have her own household and marriage.

  Beth was dead, dead, and his father hadn’t called the doctor. That had been up to Aldus. His father had done nothing after Dyer died. He couldn’t even be bothered to have a grave dug for his own wife. Aldus had done that, paid the diggers with the family silver and the priest with his mother’s wedding ring. He had kept himself and Beth fed after that, existing as quiet ghosts around the simmering wrath of their father. When Beth would cough around him, he would slap her. Aldus tended Beth for the months until she died, boiling broth from bones and wiping sweat from her brow. But it was for naught. All of it.

  When Beth died. Lascaris buried her himself. There was nothing left to pay the gravediggers. The priest, feeling sorry for Aldus, came by for free to offer a blessing. There was no one else at that grave.

  Coated in mud, Aldus returned to the house late at night. It was as he saw now, his father staring out of a black window, wordless in his fury at losing his favored son.

  Aldus was alone. He knew this. He knew that life was fleeting, and it was only him and his father.

  He wanted to be more alone than that.

  Aldus reached for the small kerosene lamp on the table, the only light in the house. He reached for it and flung it as hard as he could at Pleasant.

  The glass shattered, and lamp oil spattered all over his father and the wall. Pleasant went up like a wad of ephemeral paper, flailing and howling. His struggles caught everything he touched on fire—the drapes, the settee, his paintings.

  Lascaris watched. He watched his father die and then walked out of the house.

  He studied alchemy, in search of the key to eternal life, the Great Work. He knew that, somehow, there had to be a way to defeat the monster of consumption. He thought he’d found it in the texts of the old alchemical masters, in his own experiments.

  But that was at an end. Now, in the spirit world, he could not kill his father and walk away. He was trapped, bound to these images of his family, playing over and over in this cursed house. His father simply gazed out the window, into the black, with his hands behind his back, burning slowly. Soon, he fell into a puddle of ash and a stain on the carpet.

  Lascaris turned away, to the basement. There had to be a way out of the spirit world, out of his private hell. He spied on the physical world, peering into his teacup, where pale images of the physical world moved if he concentrated hard enough. He glimpsed the passage of time, the wonders the modern world had conjured without magic, with only the tools offered by science. Imagine what the world could be if magic were invoke
d again! He knew that there must be ways to reach it, at certain times of year and under certain moon phases, with certain artifacts, ways to touch it. He would discover them; he would find his way back.

  And when he found his way back, he would complete the Great Work.

  He would master the terrible art of immortality, no matter the cost.

  Chapter 5

  Off to See the Wizard

  “This is something like going to see the wizard, isn’t it, Sig?”

  Petra opened the door to the nursing home for the coyote. He trotted inside, wrinkling his nose at the smell of bleach. Sporting a collar, Sig was often purposefully ignored here and assumed to be a service dog. The staff had come to know him and turned a blind eye. Mostly. As Petra reached the front desk, the night nurse behind the desk whistled for him. It was 6:00 a.m., too early for the front office staff to arrive. Sig trotted up to him and sat down, head cocked in an adorably manipulative fashion, tail wagging. The nurse grinned back at him and gave him a dog treat. Sig took it delicately from his hand and chewed it thoughtfully.

  “Thank you,” Petra said to him, pausing to sign in. It was early for official visiting hours, but the staff were fine with Petra visiting her father as often as she could, as long as she wasn’t interrupting treatment.

  “I brought you folks a little something.” Petra placed a paper bag on the desk.

  The nurse peered inside and grinned. “Chocolate muffins! Awesome!”

  “They’re from Bear’s Gas ’n’ Go. They’re amazing. I had one on the way over, and I can die happy now.”

  The nurse leaned around a flower arrangement to speak with her in a low voice. “It’s good that you’re here for your dad. He’s been having a tough time lately.”