Dark Alchemy

by Laura Bickle

  Petra stared at it. It looked like junk: bits of wheels, planks, and broken crates. She swept her light through the mess, scanning through cobwebs. There was something uneven about the floor here, and she blew away sawdust. She could make out the outline of a square shape below. Putting her shoulder to the pile of debris, she scraped it aside with a splintering shriek.

  Petra grinned. A trapdoor pierced the floor, with rough and rusty hinges. Maybe it led to a cellar. Maybe it led to something more. She set the Locus down carefully .

  Petra tugged at the door handle, and it opened with some effort. She shined her flashlight down into the hole. She could tell that the walls were earth, and she smelled dirt. A tunnel sloped off and to the west.

  Sig looked askance at the burrow, one ear folded backward.

  Petra pocketed the Locus and dangled her feet into the tunnel.

  “You can stay here, if you want,” she told him. “But Alice is going down the rabbit hole.”

  She swung down into darkness. Her feet hit first, but she lost her balance on the uneven surface and pitched forward. The flashlight bounced away.

  She felt dirt under her fingers where she’d slid down at an an angle. She could see the glow of her flashlight behind her, and she scrabbled in the dirt for it. She shined the light back and forth, trying to get her bearings.

  Sig came down in an avalanche of loose soil, all churning claws and fur. He landed on Petra’s chest and knocked her ass over teakettle until she came to rest against an earthen wall, tangled in coyote.

  The hatch banged shut above, blotting out the dim square of light from the barn.

  “Shit.”

  Petra scrambled to the top and pushed up on the hatch, but it was too heavy for her to lift from this awkward angle.

  “I guess that we’re committed,” she told Sig.

  She swept the flashlight ahead of her in the tunnel, feeling loose dirt, then the stirring of air. She stumbled forward, her breathing echoing in the closed space. Sig pressed his nose to the ground, delighting in the strange odors. Petra supposed that he was accustomed to enclosed dens in his predomesticated life.

  Petra had never been claustrophobic, but the knowledge that she was unable to retreat terrified her. She’d always had a way out. She swallowed her fear and kept moving forward over the uneven ground, feeling worms moving in the crumbling clay walls that were still wet from today’s rain. She brushed spiderwebs and drizzling water away from her face, tried not to imagine what might be making the squeaking sounds she heard above her. More than once, Sig paused and began to dig in the earth. He’d lag behind, and she would hear crunching sounds.

  These tunnels must be what she saw with the ground penetrating radar, this labyrinth underground. She wished that she had more time to explore, to map out this expanse with her GPR device. The Locus was admittedly useful, in its way, but she wanted to apply some technology to that magic. She paused to draw blood from her skinned knees to consult the Locus, which kept urging her west.

  She stumbled in the darkness for more than two hours by her watch, feeling her way along the walls and following the clotting bead of blood on the Locus. Eventually, the passageway widened, and she could see light up ahead.

  Light. The surface. She breathed deeply, heartened by the sight of the comforting glow. She moved toward it, and realized that it wasn’t sunshine after all.

  The burrow widened out into a large chamber that pulsed with an unearthly golden luminosity. But it was a glow she recognized—­the same fluorescing shine of Gabriel’s blood in the dark.

  She turned on her heel, staring at the ceiling. Tree roots reached down from the roof of the chamber, glistening with that pulsing light and dripping sparkling water. It was beautiful, alive in a way that she hadn’t contemplated plants or minerals being truly alive before. If she believed in a fairy kingdom, this would be the place that Titania and Oberon ruled.

  Gingerly, she reached up to touch one of the roots. It felt warm, and the movement of the light throbbed through the wood. She gazed on it in wonder. What would this look like, if she could take it apart and analyze it? Would it contain gold and phosphorus, like Gabriel’s blood? Or some strange version of chlorophyll, like plants that grew in caves?

  As her vision adjusted, she realized that she wasn’t alone.

  Shadows surrounded her. She gasped, stepping backward. The shadows didn’t move in the pulsing light. She approached one of them, squinting to see as she became aware of a putrid smell, like an unattended compost pile. A flicker of yellow light played over the form, and she stifled a scream with her fist as she shined the flashlight full into the forest of tree roots.

  A decomposing body hung suspended, feet not touching the ground. She could make out the glisten of moldering flesh over white teeth, the bottomless black of an eye socket. Something foul and viscous dripped from it to the floor.

  And there were more. More than a dozen, dangling like rotting fruit. Bits of intestines protruded from abdominal cavities, rotting limbs attached to torsos only with bits of stretched-­out sinew. The remaining flesh was mottled green and black, bloated. Petra’s heart hammered in her mouth.

  The roots shifted with a rustle, reaching toward the mouth of the chamber, the way that sunflowers turn toward the sun.

  Petra shrieked, and Sig growled.

  Behind her, Petra heard the scrape and shuffle of footsteps. She backed up against the wall of the chamber and Sig crouched down before her, the hair on his back rising.

  It was Gabriel. He strode into the chamber, carrying something. With horror, Petra realized that the bundle he held was a body: Jeff, bent and broken as he had hung from the tree. Gabriel himself looked inhuman: His eyes glowed in the darkness like fireflies.

  His voice was soft and resigned, echoing oddly in the chamber. “I see you found the Lunaria.”

  “What the hell is this?” Petra’s voice was barely more than a whisper. It scraped her throat raw to speak around her fear.

  “This is the secret of the Hanged Men.”

  Gabriel lifted the body up to the roots, as if he were making an offering. The roots rustled down, gathered the body to them with what seemed like tenderness, and lifted it into that biomass of teeming light.

  Petra struggled to understand. Images of John Wayne Gacy’s basement surfaced in her mind. “These bodies . . .”

  “Are the Hanged Men. Each one of us was hanged from this tree. The Alchemical Tree, the Lunaria. The marriage of heaven and earth. It’s a remnant of one of Lascaris’s old experiments. At one time, he worked the land, trying to work the alchemical processes on a larger scale.”

  “Alchemical processes?” she echoed.

  “How do you not know?” he asked her. “You wear the Green Lion devouring the sun.” He gestured at her neck.

  Petra clutched her pendant. “It was my father’s. He disappeared here, many years ago.”

  “And you came to search for him?” Gabe’s voice fairly dripped with skepticism.

  “Yes. What does ‘the Green Lion devouring the sun’ mean?” She tried to focus her mind on the puzzle, not the horror crowding around her.

  “It signifies mercury dissolving gold—­the dissolution process. There are seven processes that the alchemist must accomplish in order to achieve a perfect transformation: calcination, dissolution, coagulation, sublimation, mortification, separation, and conjunction. This tree is frozen in the mortification stage. We all are.” He reached up and touched a root. It curled around his hand like a lover’s caress.

  “The Hanged Men are a product of a flawed and incomplete process. We cannot be transformed or restored to perfect, eternal life. Or even an imperfect mortal one. We are suspended in the mortification stage, what the old masters called the Black Raven or the Raven King—­the black, decaying stage of alchemy. All things that give rise to life must first decompose.”

 
“How long,” Petra squeaked. “How long have you been trapped?”

  Gabe smiled, and it was a sad smile. “A very long time. I was the first to be hanged from the tree. The others came later.”

  Petra’s nails bit into her palms. “How long?” she demanded. “Is that really your picture in that mourning brooch?”

  His eyes cast downward. “Yes. Since the spring of 1862.”

  “But Sal nearly killed you.”

  Something dark and murderous flitted across his face. “Wood. He used wood. The tree gives us life, and only a tree can take it away.”

  “This is it?” she croaked, gesturing to the bodies. “This is the price of living forever?”

  His mouth flattened. “Yes. We must return here, to the Lunaria. In its embrace, we decompose and are reborn again. Day after day, night after night. We can’t go more than a ­couple of days without it. We can’t wander very far from it. We’re bound together, always in its shadow.”

  “Is that . . . is that what’s happening to Jeff?”

  Gabe stared up at Jeff’s body. The roots were busily winding around it, digging into the skin with a wet, sucking sound. Unbinding him. Remaking him. “The magic has drained out of the tree. Each successive generation of Hanged Men has been less . . . human.”

  “They don’t speak,” she said.

  “Some can, and choose not to. Some can’t. It’s been more than a century since anyone dared . . .” Gabe closed his eyes. “ . . . since a Hanged Man was made. Sal will have made an even more terrible monster than we are, if Jeff survives.”

  “Sal’s in the hospital. He’s going to be arrested,” she said numbly.

  “I know. But he will be back.”

  Petra looked down at her hands. She had intruded upon something intimate and sad. The fear drained out of her in the face of trying to understand this terrible curse, to apply some logic to it.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, simply.

  Gabe nodded. “I appreciate that. That sympathy. But you had no hand in it.”

  She took a deep, quavering breath. What would he do, now that she had seen this? “Will you turn me into one of those ossified skeletons?”

  Gabe blinked.

  She said it with her chin lifted, steeling herself, standing before a train that was inevitably going to run her over.

  “No,” he said quietly. “Those were not our doing. And I’m not a reasonless killer.”

  She squinted at him. “But you moved the body on the ranch. You hid it.”

  He inclined his head. “We did. Because we didn’t want the police crawling around the ranch to find . . .” He sketched the Hanged Men with his hand.

  “Oh. But what . . . what are they, then, if you didn’t do it?” she asked.

  “I’m not certain. I have theories.”

  “Such as?”

  “Initially, I thought it to be a result of one of Lascaris’s old experiments. Some part of the calcination process reawakened.”

  “Calcination,” she echoed.

  “Calcination is the first alchemical process, the reducing of a material to bone to purify it. Once the material is calcined, it can be dissolved in the next stage. But this step of the process is flawed as I have seen it, in which the bone seems to react with overgrowth.” He stared up at the surface in frustration. “We’ve found three bodies here, on the ranch.”

  Petra licked her lips. “Three?” She’d seen just the one, with the Jolly Roger watch.

  “We found what we thought was a man and a woman together. Then a man.”

  “Those must have been Cal’s friends. Adam and Diana.” Her heart ached for the boy. He’d be alone.

  “Cal and Adam and Diana are Stroud’s ­people?”

  “Yes.”

  “Spies.” Gabriel narrowed his glowing eyes. “I always thought Stroud was a charlatan, incapable of anything substantial in the alchemy department. But I begin to wonder if he might have something to do with this runaway calcination process.”

  “I found a body on Specimen Ridge,” Petra said slowly. “Like the one here. It has microscopic elements similar to petrified wood.”

  Gabe frowned. “Interesting. Lascaris spent some time working on Specimen Ridge.”

  “So . . . he used Specimen Ridge because of the calcined petrified remains there?”

  Gabe shook his head. “No. His experiments created those petrified forests.”

  Petra stared at him. “I don’t believe you.”

  Gabe laughed, a bitter sound that caused the tree roots to retract and writhe. “After all this, you don’t believe me?”

  “Let’s just say that, even if I believe everything you’ve told me. About you. About the Hanged Men. About Lascaris. I still have a hard time believing that alchemy can affect geology on a grand scale.” She shuddered and looked up at the hanging shadows.

  Gabe leaned forward on the balls of his feet. With his hands in his pockets, he looked a bit nervous. Hesitant. “What if I could prove it to you? Show you something truly amazing.”

  “More amazing than this?” Petra lifted an eyebrow.

  “More amazing than this. And beautiful.” He glanced up at the rotten fruit. “It smells better, too.”

  “So . . . you’re not going to kill me?”

  Gabe shook his head. “No. This is the most conversation I’ve had in a hundred and fifty years. If I killed you, I’d have to talk to Sal.” He grimaced, and there was a dark glint of humor in his gaze.

  Petra swallowed, gave a tentative smile. Her curiosity was devouring her fear. “Okay. Show me.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  The Marriage of Heaven and Earth

  “Alchemy is a strange art. It’s horrible and beautiful at the same time.”

  Petra followed Gabe down the tunnels that smelled like earth and metal, trailing her fingers along the walls. She could make out various layers of sediment. Parts of the tunnels looked as if they were man-­made, held up by haphazard stones and support beams. Other parts seemed entirely organic, as if a giant mole had dug a perfectly round and smooth pathway. Sig seemed most interested in those areas, sniffing vigorously.

  “You seem to know a lot about it. Were you an alchemist?”

  Gabe laughed and shook his head. “No. I was a Pinkerton agent.”

  “No shit? You were . . . as a strikebreaker? Private security?” She blinked, dredging her memory for old history classes.

  “Lascaris kept pulling gold out of thin air, and his investors were beginning to wonder how he accomplished it. And whether the secret could be reproduced.”

  “Lucky you.”

  “Luck had nothing to do with it. Pinkerton sent me to investigate Lascaris because I’d investigated other occult cases: phony fortune-­tellers, spontaneous human combustion, séances. I had an academic knowledge of alchemy and the supernatural, but not a practical one.”

  “So . . . you were the nineteenth-­century version of the X-­Files?” Petra struggled to frame it in modern terms.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Never mind.” Sal probably didn’t invite the Hanged Men over to his house to watch television and eat popcorn. “The Pinkerton business . . . Is that . . . is that why you were hanged?”

  “I was hanged because Lascaris caught me nosing around his house. The folks in Temperance didn’t take kindly to anyone making accusations about their hero.” He rolled his glowing eyes.

  “Lascaris was a hero?”

  “Sure. He was the entire economy for the town.”

  “Wow.” She stared up at the leak in the ceiling of the tunnel, drizzling rainwater. Sig paused to bite at the flow and slurp noisily. “Did Lascaris dig these?”

  Gabriel’s gleaming eyes bobbed ahead. “I think he made some of them, just to make it look like he was busy hunting for gold. The Hanged Men du
g the more useful ones underneath the barn and one under Sal’s house. We don’t know about the rest. We suspect that the tree made some of them of its own volition.”

  Petra was itching to get her hands on a sample of that tree, to look at it under the microscope. She was kicking herself for not breaking off a piece when she’d had the chance. “Does Sal know about the tunnels?”

  Gabe shook his head. “Not really. He knows that we go to ground. But he has no idea about the extent of them, where they go, and how far they go.”

  “That’s convenient for you guys.”

  “At times, it’s ensured our very survival.”

  “I imagine that it’s difficult to remain in the same place for years on end. Never changing. Someone must have suspected, at some time?”

  “Rarely.” Gabe shrugged. “The Rutherfords seized the Alchemical Tree from Lascaris’s control. They have always had ranch hands, and we have been theirs, since that time. We’re sort of like inherited farm equipment. Most ­people are ­people.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Most ­people don’t want to acknowledge any weirdness in their midst. The natural reaction is to go out of one’s way to ignore it. It’s a fairly easy reaction to exploit.”

  “Still . . . no one in town notices that you don’t age?”

  Gabe glanced sidelong at her. “You were the first. We keep to ourselves, and most ­people pay no attention to us.”

  “That must be terrible.” She couldn’t imagine, living years on end, days without change, with no one acknowledging one’s existence. It would be like being invisible.

  “Eternity isn’t very glamorous,” he admitted. “It’s a lot of shoveling shit, watching the seasons turn. It’s actually pretty boring.”

  “I can’t imagine a hundred and fifty years of cow shit.”

  He chuckled, and the sound seemed to thaw some of the chill that radiated from him. “It is a lot of shit.”

  “Do you miss it?”