The Alchemist's Key

by Traci Harding

  ‘Andrew,’ she repeated, daring to smile. ‘You have my deepest and most heartfelt gratitude.’

  ‘Andrew?’ Talbot stood poised in the hallway, just outside of Rosia’s and Winston’s sleeping quarters. ‘What is the meaning of this?’ The butler eyed the old-fashioned attire on the mysterious young woman in his son’s company.

  ‘Give me five minutes, Father,’ Andrew begged his patience, ‘and I’ll explain everything. The Baron is well aware of the situation.’

  Talbot, although appearing decidedly worried, gave a nod to grant Andrew leave.

  ‘Thanks. I’ll be right back.’ Andrew led Grace down the hall to the room located next to his own.

  ‘My gosh!’ Grace gasped upon noting the one big bed therein. ‘I once shared this room with two other girls. It has changed some since then.’

  ‘Then I trust you’ll be comfortable. The bathroom’s the last door at the end of the hall.’ Andrew pointed in the general direction. The questioning look on Grace’s face made him wonder if he should give her a lesson in using all the apparatus.

  In the era Grace was from, there hadn’t been any such thing as a bathroom. There had been Cabinet Rooms, and Dressing Rooms where the Baron and his family could wash, on the rare occasions when they did. But the servants would have been lucky to have had a wash bowl and a bedpan between them.

  Just the thought of explaining to Grace that she could strip naked and bathe in a full tub of water made Andrew feel a mite uncomfortable, let alone enlightening her as to how the toilet was used.

  ‘I’ll show her.’ Louisa had entered in time to hear Andrew’s directions and, to his great relief, she ushered him out of the room. ‘I’ve brought you some pyjamas,’ she told Grace, holding out her offering. ‘Probably not quite what you’re used to … but hey, you’re in the twentieth century now.’

  Andrew found his father in the dining room with the Baron. He and Hannah were listening to Wade explain what he knew about the strange occurrence to which they had just borne witness.

  ‘Well!’ Hannah raised her brows in disbelief, unable to truly fathom what she was being told. ‘You certainly put on an extraordinary dinner party.’

  ‘The emergency is over,’ Hugh announced, as he entered behind Andrew. ‘All the equipment is switched off.’

  ‘Good-oh,’ Wade acknowledged, shifting his sights from Hugh to Andrew. ‘I think it’s safe to assume that we found your trigger, Andy. That theory of yours concerning the electronics is looking pretty well spot on.’

  Talbot, having noticed the blood on his son’s sleeve, had moved to investigate his wound without interrupting the conversation.

  ‘As someone older and wiser, Talbot, what do you make of all this?’ Wade queried.

  ‘My Lord, I am certainly no expert on such matters. This is an old house, and one expects it to have a few ghosts in the closet … but the occurrences you describe go far beyond haunting.’ The butler inspected the bloody slash on Andrew’s right arm. Luckily, the wound was not deep enough to be serious. ‘Still, I don’t think you need me to tell you that to toy with such phenomena is obviously dangerous.’

  ‘I’m inclined to second that view,’ Hugh stated, having a peek at Andrew’s arm. ‘At least until we have some idea of what we are dealing with.’ He looked at Wade in appeal to his better judgment. ‘You can’t just go around pulling people and objects out of history. We don’t know what kind of disastrous impact that might have on the present.’

  ‘He’s right,’ Hannah agreed, although the Baron quite obviously didn’t like their view.

  ‘What … so I’m supposed to do without my computers? I’ll go stark raving mad!’

  ‘No, not necessarily,’ Hugh theorized. ‘Be a bit conservative with the power for awhile though. And if the cat shows up, don’t follow it.’

  9

  The Temple

  He moved down the staircase and through the Great Hall, where the front doors were open wide. The great fountain and the estate grounds were shrouded by an unearthly mist. Neither day nor night prevailed, but an eerie kind of twilight — Wade had been here before. He turned left and made his way towards the side of the house where the gazebo was located, only now the temple stood in its stead and Arthur guarded the entrance.

  As Wade approached the dwelling the cat hissed incessantly, warning him against proceeding further.

  The temple door crept open and a deep growl was heard from within. A great wolf-like hound sprang from the shadows to attack the feline. Fear beset Wade’s heart at the sight of the huge canine, though the dog seemed to have little interest in him. Arthur turned, and reared to confront the larger beast. Although he put up a good fight, the cat was eventually persuaded to flee, the dog hot on his heels.

  Beyond the open door, the temple was begging to be explored.

  The interior of the circular dwelling was lush. The heavy velvet curtains on the curved windows were drawn open, to allow the spooky exterior light to illuminate the chamber’s extravagant furnishings. In place of the gazebo’s central marble column there now stood a much larger room. On the opposite side of the rounded feature there was a door that opened as Wade neared it.

  Within was a staircase that spiralled down and around a huge metal beam. This beam was part of the base of the metal spike that rose to a pinnacle far beyond the glass apex of the roof. Wade descended, in search of the sturdy beam’s source, to find a perfectly rounded library area that was the same dimensions as the room above. The great metal pole, however, disappeared into the solid timber floor.

  Wade moved further into the room. Beyond the reading lounges and side tables he came to a writing desk, where a large notebook lay open. There on the page before him was a hand-drawn copy of the mosaic that was set into the floor of the marble dining room. Apart from the cross with triangles at each point, there were some scribbled notes next to each of the differing triangular images.

  Wade was not given a chance to absorb the information, as the room was suddenly engulfed in flames.

  ‘Grandfather!’ cried a lad who came charging down the spiral staircase. He threw back a rug, located between the reading lounges, then lifted a trapdoor in the floor beneath.

  Unlike the episodes Wade had experienced in the house, the boy seemed oblivious to Wade’s presence. This young man was Ernest Ashby, five or six years older than the last time Wade had glimpsed him.

  ‘That contraption will be the death of you,’ he cried down through the hole in the floor. ‘Leave it! We must get out of here.’

  As Ernest descended to the lower level, Wade followed him — down another staircase. This room was much larger than the two previous floors and housed a huge apparatus of mind-boggling proportions.

  ‘Take this, quickly.’ An aged John Ashby placed a peculiarly shaped object in a wooden box before handing it to his grandson. ‘You must hide this, and my notebook, from your father.’

  ‘Come with me now, and you can hide them yourself,’ Ernest begged.

  The aging Baron grabbed hold of the boy and shook him. ‘You keep your promise to me, Ernest. Your father and his peers must not discover the power source … it is not the right time.’

  The lad, wide-eyed with horror, nodded in accord.

  ‘Now go!’ the Baron urged, ‘and don’t turn back, no matter what happens, understand?’

  Ernest backed up a few steps, his teary eyes fixed on his grandfather, before he turned and quickly fled the burning structure.

  With the lad’s departure, John seemed to calm down. ‘My discovery shall be buried with me,’ he said, taking a seat to await his fate. He then turned his sights to Wade. ‘Immortality will be mine,’ he told him, as the flaming ceiling timbers collapsed in on them both.

  The next thing Wade knew, he was seated bolt upright in bed with perspiration pouring from every inch of his body — even his toes were sweating. He looked at the door that led to his drawing room; someone was coming.

  Lit by rays of twilight, the door swung open w
ide and Hugh scampered into view. ‘Where’s the fire?’ he demanded to know. ‘Are you alright? You were yelling fire at the top of your lungs. Wade?’ Hugh approached his friend, concerned as he noted Wade’s distressed state of being.

  ‘There was a third level,’ mumbled Wade in explanation.

  ‘To what?’ Hugh took up Wade’s robe and placed it around his shoulders, for his friend was clearly trembling.

  ‘The temple.’ Wade’s eyes were fixed in midair as he recalled the finer details of what he’d seen. ‘John Ashby was secretly building something down there.’

  ‘Steady on.’ Hugh gave half a laugh to lighten the spooky, and somewhat serious, mood that Wade was in. ‘I hate to point this out and spoil your speculation, but you are not wandering around the house now, old chum … you’re in bed, having experienced nothing more than a nightmare.’

  Wade found Hugh’s view to be not entirely convincing. ‘I was only dreaming on that first night, too, though the facts of my vision proved true enough. John Ashby’s secret project has something to do with the strange occurrences in this house, I know it.’

  Hugh, ever the sceptic, failed to see how this could be the case. ‘You’re talking about a man who died over two hundred years ago … they did not have enough technological know-how to invent such a device back then … we don’t have the technology now! The damn temple was destroyed anyway, its contents along with it.’

  Wade inhaled deeply as he considered Hugh’s words, but as he allowed the air to rush from his lungs his belief remained unchanged. ‘I wouldn’t bank on that.’

  At breakfast, in the servants’ quarters, Andrew introduced Grace to the rest of the house staff and she was greeted warmly by all, except Rosia.

  ‘Mamma-mia.’ Rosia slapped both hands to her cheeks and backed up out of the room in haste.

  Andrew excused himself to pursue her. ‘Rosia, what is it?’ He caught up with the housemaid as she entered her sleeping quarters.

  ‘She is a ghost,’ she explained, pacing to and fro in a fluster.

  ‘No, Rosia. She is very real, I assure you.’ Andrew attempted to calm her down.

  ‘I have the sight,’ she stated in a whisper, her tone harshly serious. ‘And I have seen this girl before.’

  Andrew was not given the chance to wipe the scepticism from his face.

  ‘Have you never heard the crying late at night, from the room next to your own?’ She raised an eyebrow in question.

  The expression on his face must have been enough of an answer, for indeed he had. ‘But upon investigation there is never anybody there.’

  ‘To your eyes, perhaps, but not to mine.’ Rosia smiled, pleased to have made her point, then she was deadly serious again. ‘I have seen the crying maid, on more than one occasion, and the visitation is always the same. She stands upon a chair, in the middle of that room, her clothes tattered and ripped in places.’

  Andrew’s eyes opened wide, drawn into her tale.

  ‘The maid places a noose around her neck,’ Rosia continued, ‘and, with one final howl, she kicks the chair from beneath herself.’

  Andrew felt giddy as a scenario took form in his mind. ‘Did she appear like she might have been raped?’ He was almost too scared to ask.

  ‘That would be my guess.’ Rosia was frank, ‘and, more than likely, by more than one fellow. Poor little mite must have killed herself, rather than live with the shame of it.’

  ‘But Rosia,’ Andrew put to her, ‘if I have, somehow, reached into time and plucked her out, won’t she be spared all that now?’

  ‘I am not God, I don’t know, and you shouldn’t presume to play God either.’

  Andrew wasn’t really listening. His own speculations preoccupied his thoughts. ‘But I saved her from such a situation … and if Grace kills herself almost immediately afterward, then pulling her out of there can surely have no great affect on history.’

  ‘You can’t know that for sure, Andrew. Grace is not of this time. It is not right,’ Rosia insisted.

  ‘Just because it’s never been done before doesn’t mean it is wrong,’ Andrew argued.

  ‘Oh, it’s been done before,’ Rosia nodded to assure him. ‘There are portholes to other eras and dimensions all over this planet, where the veil between inner and outer time is very thin. The Bermuda Triangle and the Devil’s Triangle are both famous for such time-slips, but there are many other similar places that are less well known.’

  ‘Do you think Ashby might be one such place?’ Andrew quizzed, most intrigued by her theory.

  ‘If what you claim is the truth, it would certainly seem to be a possibility.’

  Andrew spent some time with Rosia, telling her of the occurrences he and the new Baron had experienced and of his seriously incomplete trigger theory. Although Rosia had seen many a ghost at Ashby she hadn’t, to the best of her knowledge, moved out of the present day when confronted by one of them. She had noted that visitations were strengthened and were more frequent when electrical devices were in use in the house, which was why she avoided using modern machinery.

  Rosia agreed with Andrew that all the young Baron’s electronics could have something to do with the materialisation of ghostly presences in the house. Still, she was not very well schooled in science. She suggested that as the previous Barons of Ashby had been most interested in such phenomena, Andrew might find more information in the library.

  Later that morning, Wade had Grace brought to his drawing room for a little chat. Hugh, Louisa and Andrew were also present.

  Wade was curious to know how long Grace had been in the employ of John Ashby.

  ‘Just a few months,’ she replied. ‘He was a good man, hard-working and honest. Unlike his son, Lord Frances, who drank to excess, gambled and frequently assaulted the female staff.’

  ‘Would you say that the Baron was a man of science?’ Wade queried further.

  ‘Oh, most certainly. It was said that many a famous scientist had stayed at the house as the Baron’s guest. He was a fellow of the Royal Society, and travelled there often to hear lectures.’

  ‘Lectures on the nature of electricity, perhaps?’ posed Wade.

  ‘Objection,’ Hugh cut in playfully. ‘You’re leading the witness.’

  ‘Shh!’ Louisa urged, looking back to Grace.

  ‘Yes,’ she recalled, ‘I heard that word mentioned.’

  ‘Did you ever see inside the Baron’s temple?’ Wade asked the pertinent question, and everyone held their breath as they awaited the response.

  ‘I did serve tea there to the Baron and his guests a couple of times.’ Grace couldn’t understand what everyone was so fascinated by.

  ‘On the first or second level?’ Wade pried further.

  ‘Both,’ replied Grace.

  ‘What about the third level?’ Wade raised a brow in question.

  ‘Why, my Lord, there was no third level,’ Grace advised politely.

  ‘See.’ Hugh was most pleased to hear this. ‘You were dreaming, my friend.’

  ‘Although …’ Grace ventured to say, ‘the Baron’s wee grandson did mention something once about a wonderful machine beneath the library, but the Baron made the child out to be imagining things.’

  Wade looked back to Hugh with a grin. ‘Dreaming, hey?’

  ‘But I never saw it,’ Grace was quick to add. ‘Nor was there ever any other mention of it.’

  ‘Thank you, Grace.’ Wade wound up their little talk. ‘You’ve been most helpful.’

  Hannah arrived back at Ashby later that day with a bag full of clothes that she’d collected from the girls at the College. ‘I thought Grace might be able to use these,’ she explained to Wade. ‘And,’ she rummaged into the bag, pulling out a gift-wrapped package, ‘I brought you a present.’ She held her offering out to him.

  Taken by surprise, Wade didn’t know what to say. Was this some sort of an indication of her affection?

  ‘Call it a peace offering,’ she advised upon noting his perplexed expression. ‘I
thought they might help contain the strange occurrences you’ve been experiencing.’

  When Wade unwrapped the two huge chunks of solid quartz crystal, he was even more confused.

  ‘Apparently crystals absorb electromagnetic radiation.’ She shrugged to imply she wasn’t sure if she believed it either. ‘It’s worth a try.’

  ‘Well, thank you.’ Wade accepted them graciously, although he was sceptical. ‘It was a lovely thought.’

  ‘Actually, I do have an ulterior motive,’ Hannah confessed. ‘I thought that, if they do work, you might be able to show me some of your computer images.’

  ‘In that case, we’ll certainly give them a try.’

  Hannah found Grace in the kitchen, helping Winston clean up the dishes from lunch. The cook excused the girl, and the two women retired to the maid’s quarters before Hannah handed over the bag of clothes.

  ‘I thought this stuff might suffice until you have the chance to buy some new clothes of your own,’ she explained.

  Grace, who’d never owned more than two sets of clothes at a time, was struck completely speechless as she viewed all the attire laid out on her bed.

  ‘I could take you shopping, if there’s nothing here you like,’ Hannah added, not too sure of how to take the maid’s reaction.

  ‘No, ma’am,’ said Grace. ‘They are lovely … more beautiful than anything I have ever owned. It’s just …’ she hesitated, fit to blush.

  ‘Yes,’ Hannah prompted.

  ‘Are you sure they are appropriate? I don’t mean to seem rude or ungrateful,’ Grace was quick to add, ‘but these appear more like underclothes.’

  Hannah giggled, considering that they probably did seem a little daring compared to the attire Grace was used to. ‘Take a look at what I am wearing.’ Hannah rose to model the skin-hugging bodysuit, short flared skirt and boots that she had on.

  Grace smiled broadly, very much liking the outfit although she could hardly imagine wearing it.

  ‘There are some things in here that are more modest.’ Hannah sorted through the pile of clothes, selecting items.