Soul Stealer

by Martin Booth

  She wrenched it from its mounting, hugged it to her chest with one arm and pulled the safety pin.

  “Afeared of you!” she panted boldly. “Never!”

  Loudacre turned around. Pip squeezed the extinguisher trigger. A long blast of argon and nitrogen gas hit him full in the face. He raised his hands in defense. The freezing gases, under pressure, peeled his skin away from his hands. Eventually, he fell against the console and slumped to the floor, whimpering and catching his breath.

  When the extinguisher was empty, Pip lurched to the control room door. Once outside, her breathing became normal, and she headed as fast as she could up the stairs to the reactor hall.

  Halfway up, she came face to face with Scrotton running pell-mell down towards her. Just a meter or two from her, he launched himself into midair, sailed over her head, landed by the control room door and disappeared inside.

  Pip reached the reactor hall. Bursting into it, she saw Yoland standing close to the hole in the floor. The carbon-dioxide coolant was no longer rushing out under pressure. Alarm bells continued to ring. The Scrottons stood in a circle around him, facing out. Tim and Sebastian stood a few meters from the circle.

  “What’s happened?” she asked Tim.

  “Pressure’s down. Yoland’s about to do the stuff. Where’s Loudacre?”

  “Out of the game,” Pip answered. “The rowan disc and punitor power didn’t work, so I put out his fire instead.”

  Yoland raised his arms as if in supplication. Out of his jacket pocket protruded the end of the envelope containing the spell keys.

  “What is that?” Pip said.

  From the opening in the reactor floor appeared a vague, miasmic face like those, Pip thought, one saw sometimes in clouds on summer days, only not as dense.

  “The enemy,” Sebastian replied succinctly.

  “Whose enemy…?”

  She looked again. The face was friendly, smiling, happy. Then, in an instant, it was leering, its lip curled, its cheekbones prominent, its hair matted and long.

  “Everyone’s enemy,” Tim said, taking his sister’s hand.

  “Everyone who is good of soul and deed, that is,” Sebastian added.

  “You mean…” Pip started.

  “That,” Sebastian confirmed, “is the satanic visage of Beelzebub, Lucifer, Mephisto, Ahriman…”

  The automated voice changed. Reactor malfunction —Reactor malfunction. Containment staff red alert. Containment staff red alert.

  The ethereal face turned as blue as an electric spark and opened its mouth. A swarm of fat bluebottle flies flowed from it, circled to form a column and then flew down into the reactor. No sooner were they gone than the image dissolved into invisibility.

  “That’s what Yoland was doing when I was in detention,” Pip said. “He was calling up…”

  “We must divest Yoland of the spell keys,” Sebastian declared. “Use your powers as punitors. We are three and he but one.”

  “No choice,” Tim said. “Are we ready?”

  The others nodded.

  As one, they ran at Yoland, punching the encircling Scrottons out of the way. Several fled up the walls, chattering like angry monkeys. One fell to the ground and deflated. Sebastian closed on Yoland. For a few moments, they tussled before Sebastian was able to snatch the envelope from Yolands pocket.

  Some of the spell keys fell out to clink on the floor. A Scrotton ran to gather them up. Tim kicked out at it, his feet meeting the Scrotton’s jaw. There was a castanet-like clack as his teeth smashed into each other. Yoland tried to regain the envelope but Sebastian, after taking a few of the spell keys, threw it to Tim.

  “Take a handful each,” Sebastian shouted. “Throw them hard at the walls.”

  Pip and Tim did so. As the keys hit the reactor hall walls, they exploded in the most beautiful stark colors. Emerald, yellow, aquamarine, scarlet and violet sparks sprayed out from them, more vibrant than any firework display.

  The reactor hall door opened and Loudacre entered, his face blotched by the gas from the fire extinguisher. The backs of his hands were raw, and one of his eyes was weeping badly. The other was half closed. His lips looked chapped, his forehead as red as if he had caught too much sun.

  Pip, seeing him, put the spell keys she still had into her pocket.

  Lurching clumsily, Loudacre staggered towards Yo-land, his arms flailing in front of him. He gripped the chemistry teacher to steady himself, but this threw them both off balance. They stumbled several paces backward. At the opening into the reactor, Loudacre lost his footing.

  “He’s going in!” Tim muttered.

  Loudacre slid slowly downward, pulling on Yoland to save him, grasping his belt. He opened his mouth and yelled. It was an unearthly screech, part human, part animal, primeval and bestial.

  Yoland tried to pry Loudacre’s fingers from his belt. They were tight. He started to unfasten the buckle, but he was too late. With a jerk, Loudacre tried to raise himself, and Yoland lost his footing. As Loudacre vanished from sight, Yoland struggled to find a handhold on the surrounding panels, but they were flush with each other and offered no handles. He screamed briefly. Then he too was gone.

  The Scrottons clinging to the walls started to fall off. One, hanging from the roof girders far above, lost its hold and plummeted downward to follow Yoland and Loudacre into the reactor.

  Tim felt someone grip his shoulder. It was Pip.

  “Look!” she said, and she held out the dosimeter attached to her shirt. The square of film, which had been clear when she first put the badge on, was now dark gray.

  “Let’s get out of here!” Tim yelled.

  Sebastian ran over to the engineers and took away the nobles. All five men immediately came to their senses and set about replacing the cover and bringing the reactor coolant gas up to pressure. Tim took Mr. Clayton’s coin. He stood up unsteadily, shaking his head to clear his brain.

  Pip took the guide by the hand and led him to the exit. They went as quickly as they could down the stairway. At the reception area, the remaining members of the Atom Club cowered behind the desk.

  “Have you got Scrotton there?” Tim asked Den.

  “The one in a school uniform,” Pip added.

  “No,” came the reply. Den pointed to the door leading to the visitors’ car park. “He’s made a run for it.”

  Tim slammed the main entrance door open. Scrotton was loping fast down the road towards the outer perimeter security fence, his school blazer flaring out behind him.

  “Stop him!” Tim yelled at the police officers. “Shoot!”

  “It’s one of the school kids!” came the answer.

  “It’s not!” Tim shouted back. He could hardly tell the truth. “It’s a terrorist! He opened the reactor. He threw little bombs about. I saw him.” That at least, he thought, was a truth of sorts.

  Two of the policemen raised their submachine guns.

  “Halt or we open fire!” bellowed the most senior policeman, a sergeant.

  Scrotton paid no heed.

  “This is your last warning!”

  Scrotton, weaving from side to side, kept on going.

  “Fire!” ordered the sergeant.

  There was a short burst of automatic gunfire. The bullets struck Scrotton, spinning him around. Beyond him, the slugs ricocheted off the road surface.

  “Hold your fire!”

  The staccato chatter stopped abruptly. Their weapons at the ready, the policemen advanced down the road. Tim kept up with them, a few meters to their rear.

  Scrotton lay in the middle of the road, one arm bent under his body, his head to one side. His eyes were open and staring. Where the bullets had hit him, there were ragged holes in the material of his school uniform.

  “Oh, my God!” one of the policemen muttered, closing the safety catch on his sub-machine gun. “I’ve shot a child.”

  Yet, as the policeman spoke, Scrotton sat bolt upright.

  “You shouldn’t’ve messed with me,” he growled
loudly.

  At that, with a detonation no louder than a small firework, his body imploded and evaporated into thin air. All that remained was a wisp of smoke, soon to be blown away on a light sea breeze.

  “What the hell was that!” the police sergeant exclaimed.

  The four officers went to the spot where Scrotton’s body had lain. On the tarmac there was not so much as the slightest trace of blood.

  Pip and Sebastian caught up with Tim while the rest of the Atom Club milled around the school minibus, not knowing what to do.

  “We’ve lost our chauffeur,” quipped Tim. “Think any of them know how to drive?”

  Pip was about to reply when she heard a slight fizzing sound and looked off to her left.

  Behind a security fence topped with razor wire stood a row of huge transformers from which trailed thick, high-tension cables. These in turn led to the first of a series of massive pylons at least fifty meters high. Others fanned out over the landscape in the direction of distant low hills.

  For a length of about five meters, one of the cables was bulging, the swelling moving slowly towards the transformers. Pip gazed at it, bemused. It was as if the cable were a python that had just swallowed a rabbit.

  Then it dawned on her. When Yoland fell into the reactor, he must have still had in his possession a set of spell keys.

  “He’s done it!” she screamed at Sebastian and Tim. “Look!”

  She pointed to the cable. The bulge was picking up speed, heading for the transformer. Around it sizzled and danced a haze of green sparks.

  Pip sprinted down the security fence, keeping up with the bulge. Tim and Sebastian followed on her heels.

  By the time she reached a police Land Rover parked against the perimeter fence, she knew what she had to do. Or at least attempt. It came to her like a revelation.

  She clambered onto the hood of the police vehicle and then hoisted herself onto the roof, breaking one of the windshield wipers on the way.

  “Oi!” the sergeant hollered at her. “Get down! What do you think you’re doing?”

  Yet Pip knew exactly what she was doing.

  If each spell takes four keys, she reasoned, what happens if you upset the balance, add a fifth into the equation…?

  Standing on the vehicle roof, she fumbled in her pocket and took out one of the spell keys. Holding it between index finger and thumb, as if it were a flat stone she was going to skim across a pond, she drew her arm back and spun it at the cable. It missed.

  There was, she then realized, no chance of hitting the cable, never mind the accelerating bulge running down it. She took out another spell key. It was one of those made of white gold with the BE! furnace sign upon it.

  Wait, she told herself. Her hands shook. Wait.

  Moving ever faster, the swelling in the cable arrived at the transformer. Pip hurled the spell key at it. The key struck the top casing and bounced on to one of the huge ceramic insulators to which the cables were connected.

  At that second, the bulge reached it, too.

  For a moment, nothing happened; then the transformer erupted into orange flame. A brilliant white flare shot high into the sky, screeching like a banshee. Chrome-yellow darts of light flickered about it.

  As quickly as it started, so did the flare die down. The transformer continued to burn, the steel casing dripping like wax into the grass, which began to smolder.

  Pip climbed down from the Land Rover roof. Tim walked over to her and helped her down.

  “High five, sis!” he said jubilantly.

  They jumped in the air, their right hands clapping together.

  “And this is?” Sebastian inquired imperturbably. “You’ll learn, my man!” Tim retorted. “You’ll learn.”

  Mr. and Mrs. Ledger sat in silence before the television as the News at Ten introductory music faded and the anchorman came on.

  “Our top story tonight,” he began. “A nuclear emergency at the Jasper Point power station was averted this afternoon by the swift actions of three secondary school pupils who happened to be on a guided tour of the facility at the time.” The screen was filled with a wide shot of the power station. “According to an official spokesman, a cover on reactor-A was blown off, causing the release of carbon dioxide gas. The pupils not only succeeded in evacuating their fellow classmates from the danger area, but were also instrumental in containing much of the released gas within the reactor building. However, the two teachers accompanying the school party were killed. An official spokesman said this was regrettable. Both men were standing very close to the gas escape. A pupil is still missing and inquiries are continuing. The public have been reassured that there is no danger of radioactive contamination from the incident.”

  The picture changed to Tim, Pip and Sebastian standing by the school bus with the police officers. “The pupils, twins Timothy and Phillipa Ledger, and their friend, Sebastian Gillette, were praised by the rescue services and power station staff for their quick thinking. Dr. Singall, headmaster of Bourne End Comprehensive School in the town of Exington, which the trio attend, stated that they were a credit to the school.”

  Mrs. Ledger put her arms around Pip and Sebastian. Tim, sitting in an armchair, grinned expansively.

  “We’re so proud of you!” she said, with a catch in her voice. She smiled at Sebastian and tousled his hair. “All three of you,” she added.

  “Thank you very much, Mrs. Ledg— Sandra,” Sebastian replied.

  The picture on the TV screen changed to a brief interview with Dr. Singall standing on the area of short lawn outside the school gates, the school name board beside him.

  “This is what we expect of our pupils,” he said, looking at the interviewer to one side of the camera lens. “They are a credit to their school and young people in general.”

  The camera focus pulled back to show the school buildings.

  Tim looked at Sebastian, then at Pip, then at the television screen. They had all seen the same thing.

  In his hand, Dr. Singall was clearly holding a gold noble while, in the distance, in the top branches of the horse chestnut tree across the playground, was perched a black shape.

  It was definitely not a crow. For a start, it had pointed ears and yellow feet…

  It was late afternoon. Leaves drifted down from the trees. On the river, half a dozen mallards were swimming in and out of a reed bed on the opposite bank, up-tailing in the shallows. The bulrushes had gone to seed, their mace-like heads breaking up into fluffs of gossamer drifting away on the breeze.

  “Think we’ll get a medal?” Tim wondered as he lowered himself down next to his sister on the bench in the Garden of Eden. Then, putting on a plummy voice, he continued, “‘And what have you done, young man?’ I fought off evil and saved a nuclear power station, Your Majesty. ‘I say, jolly good show, what! Arise, Sir Timothy.’”

  “Single-handed, was it?” Pip said sarcastically.

  “Only joking,” Tim assured her. “If there’s medals, there will have to be three of them.”

  “Do you think we shall hear of Yoland again? Or de Loudéac?”

  “After they’ve been radiated, frozen stiff and fried? I think not. That’s pretty final, don’t you think?”

  Sebastian, who had been at the far end of the copse, approached them.

  “The climate is indeed very different from my childhood,” he remarked. “There are both orpine and southernwood in flower on the meadow rim. Both should bloom in July and fruit in August yet now, in late autumn, their buds are opening.”

  “How’re you feeling?” Tim inquired.

  “In what respect?”

  “Don’t you feel sleepy? Isn’t it time to pay a trip to hibernation land?”

  Sebastian sat down next to Pip. One of the mallards took to the wing, circled once over the copse and settled back on the river with the others.

  “I have been considering that,” Sebastian admitted. “By all intents and purposes, I should by now have withdrawn to my slumber, and yet I h
ave no desire so to do. I have, I sense, some other matter to address.”

  “Dr. Singall?”

  “I think not,” Sebastian declared. “It is true he possesses one of Yoland’s nobles, and yet I do not feel great evil surrounding him and it will exercise no power with Yoland gone.” He looked out across the meadow. “This is a most beautiful location. It was ever thus is my early days.”

  “Strange how such beauty can hide such wickedness,” Pip observed.

  “It is always thus. Remember what I have said. One cannot have a light without a darkness in which to put it. Without evil, how can there be goodness?”

  Pip got to her feet. The edgy mallard took to the wing again, its neck outstretched, its feet tucked in and its wings working hard to gain altitude.

  “Time for tea and scones,” she announced.

  “And potassium iodide pills…” Tim went on, crinkling his nose “… the price of being radiated.” He held up his dosimeter badge. “Now is that a souvenir or what?”

  “I could perhaps prepare an alternative infusion of vulnerary herbs,” Sebastian said meditatively, “… hare’s foot, comfrey, plantain, with common kelp…”

  The look on Pip and Tim’s faces was sufficient to give Sebastian an answer.

  They reached the gate by the coach house.

  “So,” Pip said as she opened the latch, “it seems you’ll be here for a while longer.”

  “Indeed it does,” Sebastian answered. “For better or for worse.”

  Soul Steader Reader’s Guide

  Like its companion book, Doctor Illuminatus, “Soul Stealer merges present and past and science and suspense as it explores the ancient practice of alchemy. Here are some questions that probe further into the many deep (and dark) layers of this novel.

  1) Sebastian reminds Pip and Tim of the main aims of alchemy: to make a homunculus, turn common metals into gold, and achieve immortality. He mentions a number of potions and elixirs throughout the book, including caput mortuum, aqua soporiferum, elixir vitae, and aurum potabile. How does each of these terms relate to alchemy? Do you agree that alchemy has a valid purpose? Why or why not?