The Black Alchemist: A Terrifying True Story

by Andrew Collins

  ‘ I’m beginning to wonder if I’ll ever get this finished,’ he recorded, before quickly completing his account of the dream.

  This time there were no further interruptions, and with the details of the house now out of the way, Bernard ended the difficult letter with some pertinent feelings concerning the whole Black Alchemist affair—points that he was not at all happy about:

  I don’t know what to make of all this. I do not like it at all. The man can obviously ‘pick up’ the interference, and I hope he doesn’t track the source— me.

  General impressions are that he is, I feel, an academic. Used to working on his own. Probably holds a position of trust, in a quiet environment, i.e. library, college, etc.

  Has access to equipment and books. Is working on his own and living on his own.

  Has enough knowledge to ‘block’ his name and address, but he is going too far in what he’s into. Almost, no, most certainly an obsession of re-working ancient texts. It will be his downfall. He is not heeding the signs of imbalance. The energies he is building will destroy him.

  I will not attempt a name and will not attempt the address. It is too dangerous for me at the moment. Any strange occurrences and I will ring you immediately.

  I received the disturbing letter, and absorbed its contents, fully expecting that something untoward would now happen. But nothing did. In the months that followed, only one—rather vital— piece of information was added to our knowledge of the Black Alchemist. His two-storey, terraced house—seen by Bernard during his extraordinary dream—was located in Eastbourne,8 a seaside town in East Sussex, just five miles southeast of the secluded, hilltop church of Lullington, where it had all begun one hot summer’s day in May 1985.

  8 The Dome of Kent

  Saturday, 3rd May 1986. The first red glow of the coming dawn picked out the silhouetted image of a lone church, perched high on a tree-lined hill. Dozens of large black birds— scavengers—were circling the Christian edifice in an anticlockwise motion. They were gliding, climbing and swooping, but never landing.

  The sight was out of place. Something untoward was happening at the church. The birds were symbolic representations of chaotic dark energies, building up and originating from a point somewhere within this house of God.

  Bernard awoke that morning from an extraordinary dream. It had been vivid and quite disturbing. Although he had no idea of the church’s location, he felt sure something untoward was taking place there. As to why he should have been granted a glimpse of this scene, he was not sure. For the moment, he decided to forget the matter and carry on with his usual Saturday chores—starting with taking his wife to the shopping mall.

  Despite trying to ignore the stark contents of the slightly unnerving dream, a clear view of the hilltop church stayed with him for the rest of the day.

  By early evening the imagery had become so strong he decided to retire to the relative peace of the dining room. Here he would sit and concentrate on the haunting image, see what might come to him. Quite obviously, there was a church somewhere exuding dark, unwelcoming energies strong enough for him to pick up and register as a psychic. So could he determine its location?

  Intrigued, but not over enamoured by the prospect, Bernard closed his eyes. He could still see the scavenger birds circling the church, but then he began to make out other details, not revealed in the dream.

  The church appeared to be on a hill capped by a copse of tall trees. Its architectural design suggested it was not old, probably Victorian in age. Despite this, he could see the huge stone blocks used to construct its walls were slightly weathered. An avenue of trees—conifers he believed—led the visitor through the churchyard from a lychgate to a wooden porch on the building’s north side.

  No further psychic information came, so he broke off concentration, scribbled down a few notes and left the room. Sunday, 4th May. For the second day running Bernard continued to see the black bird-like energy forms circling endlessly around the unidentified hilltop church. The feeling was that a powerful ritual act had taken place there, and whatever had been done was still in progress and growing with intensity.

  Shortly after lunch, another, rather chilling, impression was unexpectedly added to Bernard’s knowledge of the situation. Something told him the person responsible for this chaotic mayhem was the Black Alchemist. If this was so, then where was the church? And what was he up to this time? Furthermore, what had all this to do with him?

  No immediate answers came, aside from the impression that the church was situated somewhere in the southern counties. Probably on the Sussex Downs, close to the Black Alchemist’s suspected home in East Sussex.

  Monday, 5th May. No, the church was in West Kent, not Sussex—this was the feeling in Bernard’s mind now. Where exactly, he was still not sure. However, it was beginning to dawn on him that he was about to be thrust into a second confrontation with the Black Alchemist, a thought he did not relish.

  In readiness, he purchased a copy of the Ordnance Survey one inch to the mile map of the West Kent area. He had no idea exactly what was going on, or why this man should suddenly want to make his reappearance exactly one year after they had removed his stone spearhead from Lullington churchyard. All he knew was that something was gradually building up inside that church, and it would have to be dealt with before the matter got out of hand.

  Tuesday, 6th May. Bernard strolled into The Griffin, bought himself a Guinness and joined me in the corner of the crowded bar. From his jacket he produced a collection of notes, which he handed across the table. ‘You’d better read these. See what you think.’

  They contained a series of images and impressions he had received over the past few days concerning a hilltop church in Kent.

  I read them with great interest. Something was undoubtedly going on and, unusually for Bernard, he seemed eager to find out what.

  So, as we sat supping our drinks amid the noisy background din emanating from the groups of youths standing around nearby tables, Bernard concentrated on the image of the hilltop church.

  ‘The scavenger birds are still circling the hilltop,’ he said, after some moments of silence.

  Now came a further disturbing image. ‘I see grotesque demon or gargoyle-like creatures crawling about at the foot of the church walls, hopping in and out of reality. They are representative of the chaotic frenzy building up there.’

  I jotted this down.

  ‘I now see more of the church. There is an outer and an inner door within the porch. The second one leads into the church itself. Also a kind of funny-looking bell tower attached to the building, next to a protruding piece of gabled architecture.’

  So what’s been going on there?

  ‘I feel he has walked around the church, somehow closing off its energies. I can’t seem to break through into the church itself.’

  Why should he want to do this?

  ‘I suppose he’s set up some kind of wall or barrier to prevent anyone from entering inside on a psychic level,’ he offered. ‘I don’t know why.’

  So where was the church?

  Bernard broke off his concentration and looked towards me. ‘I’m going to have to stop,’ he stated, lighting a cigarette. ‘I’m beginning to feel headachy and sick. In fact, I get the feeling that, if I don’t stop, I’ll slip into a trance and something rather nasty will come through. I could hear this guttural voice in my head, which seemed poised to overshadow me.’

  Quite obviously, a strange guttural voice issuing forth from Bernard’s mouth would have been dangerous to his well-being and rather embarrassing in front of The Griffin’s jocular clientele that evening.

  Needing to use the toilets, I took the opportunity to disappear for a moment. On returning, Bernard was scribbling in the notepad.

  Sitting back, he pushed it towards me.

  There was a sketch of a huge cave, with steps leading into it, below which he’d scrawled:

  I am the priest of the sanctuary. He has cut my head from my body. It c
omes as the sun, as the spring of crystal waters.

  It meant nothing to either of us. However, I should have recalled that I’d seen similar words the previous year when reading about the dream visions of Zosimos of Panopolis, the fourth-century Graeco-Egyptian alchemist.

  ‘Come on. Let’s go across to the churchyard,’ Bernard suggested, picking up his cigarettes and standing up. ‘The atmosphere will be different out there.’

  It was a good idea. Since it was still light, it would make an ideal setting for carrying on any psychic work without interference.

  Standing beneath a large horse chestnut tree, which Bernard had always felt an affinity with, he now received further images and impressions relating to the situation.

  ‘As it’s in my mind,’ he said, beginning to pace about beneath the overhanging branches, ‘I get St Mary’s. Write it down. It’s the dedication of the church, which I can now see is next to a village green, a big one, with houses beyond that—quite old, eighteenth or nineteenth century, I should think. Our friend has walked around the church with his arms up in the air.’

  Rapidly, I scribbled down Bernard’s words.

  ‘Record this down,’ he insisted, stopping to point towards my notepad. ‘Ion. Ion is the name of the Priest of the Sanctuary I mentioned in the pub.’

  His pacing grew more intense.

  ‘Now I see the imagery associated with alchemy I first saw last year,’ he continued, ‘when I held the stone spearhead.’

  Suddenly, he broke his concentration and looked towards me. ‘Things being burnt, laboratory apparatus and ancient manuscripts, and also someone’s head being cut off and mangled with flesh and blood. Very nasty.’ But then the familiar headache and nausea returned to haunt him.

  Realising Bernard might be getting into difficulty, I asked him to stop and rest for a while. But he just continued to pace.

  11. Bernard stands beneath the horse chestnut tree in Danbury churchyard. ‘I feel a serpent or a dragon is connected in some way,’ he now revealed. ‘And the church is at “Ide Hill”, wherever that is. Something’s been placed in the church, and he’s sealed off the building on a psychic level.’

  What was placed in the church?

  ‘Same as before, I suppose.’

  What? A stone spearhead?

  ‘I assume so.’

  So, what was our job?

  ‘Remove it,’ he responded, before pausing once more to

  compose his thoughts. ‘I feel all this has something to do with Zosimos again. This priest, whose name is Ion, is one of Zosimos’s visions, which the Black Alchemist warps for his own ends.’

  I had not come across the name ‘Ion’ before, even though I recalled reading about Zosimos’s dream vision in which a priest sacrifices himself at a dome-shaped altar.

  ‘Come on, let’s get back to the pub,’ Bernard now suggested, beginning to make his way towards the church. ‘I think we’ve got all we’re going to out here.’

  Inside the Griffin we again discussed the situation whilst attempting to locate Ide Hill on the map. Almost immediately, I found it—a village of this name just a few miles from a town called Sevenoaks. The contours showed the church is indeed on a hill, part of the North Downs of Kent, and on its northern side is a fair-sized green with houses beyond that. So far, so good. The rest I could check out when I got home.

  But when would we go there?

  Bernard could not make it on a weekday, so it would have to be at the weekend. However, our Sunday was already planned. I had arranged for Bernard to meet Colin and Gelly Paddon from Milton Keynes who, in August the previous year, had been led by psychic clues to a wood close to their home. Here the couple had dug up two short swords, identical to one I had found with a colleague at a secluded pool in the county of Worcestershire back in 1979. I had also invited along my good friends Caroline Wise and Alan Cleaver.

  I therefore decided the best thing was to combine this get together with our trip to Ide Hill and invite them to accompany us on the quest. Anyway, we would probably need a little extra help and support.

  So a time was set. I would inform all parties involved.

  After this we returned to the subject of the apparent ritual carried out by the Black Alchemist at Ide Hill.

  What did Bernard think he was up to this time?

  He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Really not sure, are you?’

  Okay, so when did he think this ritual had been carried out? To help Bernard answer the question, I pointed out that if he had begun to pick up on the church overnight on Friday/Saturday, 2nd/3rd May, then it had probably occurred on or around May Day, 1st May, one of the eight pagan festival dates in the calendar year.

  Bernard agreed: ‘Yes, it’s possible.’

  If this was so, then perhaps the Black Alchemist had buried the inscribed stone spearhead at Lullington exactly one year earlier, on May Day 1985, some three weeks before we came across it.

  Bernard shook his head. ‘No, I feel it was buried a couple of months before that.’

  I thought again.

  What about spring equinox 1985, around 21st March, the main pagan festival prior to May Day?

  Bernard contemplated the idea for a moment. ‘Yes, that feels about right,’ he said, standing up. ‘Anyway, I’m off. Give me a ring to confirm times, etc.’

  I nodded, as he disappeared out of the door.

  At home I read through whatever books I possessed on the topography of Kent, looking for references to Ide Hill. Unfortunately, I found very little information about the church, which was only built in 1865, i.e. during Victorian times, just as Bernard had said. It is dedicated to St Mary and, yes, a tree-lined path of evergreens does guide the visitor via a lychgate on the northern side of the churchyard to a porch. In addition to this, there is a peculiar bell tower, or spirelet, attached to the main building.

  So Bernard had been right about the site. But why use it? The thought bugged me. Yet then I found something that provided a vital clue. Ide Hill is known as the Dome of Kent, due to a large copse of beech trees that crown the summit of the hill to form an unusual hemispherical canopy around the churchyard. The tops of these trees give Ide Hill a height of around 800 feet above sea level and create one of the most picturesque spots in the county.

  Now domes, I knew, featured in Zosimos’s Visions (preserved in his work entitled Of Virtues, Lessons 1-3), In his first vision he writes how the ‘Priest of the Adytum’, or Sanctuary, whose name is indeed Ion, stands at a ‘dome-shaped altar’, and announces:

  ‘I am Ion, Priest of the Adytum, and I have borne an intolerable force. For someone came at me headlong in the morning and dismembered me with a sword and tore me apart, according to the rigor of harmony. And, having cut my head off with the sword, he mashed my flesh with my bones and burned them in the fire of the treatment, until, my body transformed, I should learn to become a spirit.’

  In some translations of the text, it is Zosimos himself who undergoes this gruesome form of transformation at the hands of the Priest of the Sanctuary. Clearly, the purpose of conveying details of this dream vision on Zosimos’s part was to show that freeing the spirit in order to achieve immortality involves an incredible, and quite torturous, self-sacrifice, which the initiate should be prepared to submit to if he or she wishes to complete the alchemical transformation.

  Much of this imagery echoed what Bernard had been saying out in Danbury churchyard. What’s more, it strongly confirmed that the Black Alchemist was twisting Zosimos’s dream visions for his own purposes. He had almost certainly chosen Ide Hill as his ‘dome-shaped altar’ due to its topographical fame as the Dome of Kent (in some translations of Zosimos’s Visions his original words are translated as ‘bowl-shaped altar’, which is probably more accurate).

  Zosimos writes also in his Visions that in order to become a ‘man of gold’—this being someone who has completed the transformation—the alchemist, as the Priest of the Sanctuary, must construct a temple ‘ … as of white lead, as of alabaste
r, having neither commencement nor end in its construction.’

  Zosimos continues: ‘Let it have in its interior a spring of pure water, sparkling like the sun’, almost exactly what Bernard had picked up whilst in The Griffin. Zosimos then relates how ‘a serpent lies before the entry guarding the temple’. This must be first seized and then sacrificed, after which:

  Skin him and, taking his flesh and bones, separate his parts. Then reuniting the members with the bones at the entry of the temple, make of them a stepping stone, mount thereon, and enter. You will find there what you seek.

  This had to refer to the ‘serpent or a dragon’ Bernard felt was connected with what was happening at Ide Hill church, which the Black Alchemist saw as Zosimos’s temple with ‘neither commencement nor end in its construction’.

  I was beginning to understand what the Black Alchemist was attempting to achieve out at Ide Hill. Putting himself in the place of Ion, the Priest of the Sanctuary in Zosimos’s dream visions— who has suffered ‘intolerable force’ to achieve transformation into a free spirit—he was preparing the church for some kind of symbolic birth. The Christian edifice was thus being seen as Zosimos’s constructed temple, signifying the body and womb of a woman, its perimeter containing the sparkling waters of life.

  So, in the mind of the Black Alchemist, was this feminine principle expressed in Ide Hill church’s dedication to St Mary, the Blessed Virgin, who carried the Christ child in her womb? If so, then why exactly was all this important to him? It was something we would presumably find out that coming Sunday.

  9 Ide Hill

  Sunday, 11th May, 1986. My car pulled up next to Ide Hill’s village green, beyond which was St Mary’s church, situated among a canopy of tall trees. I released the seat belt and started to get out as Bernard did the same.

  ‘I hope we’re not walking into a trap,’ he said, with a little nervous cough and laugh.

  A trap? I hoped not. Anyway, what did he mean, a trap?