Kip & Shadow

by David Pietrandrea

  Enos picked a Chickadee and read the small paper tag tied to the bars.

  The Chickadee is the symbol of ‘clarity and purity of soul,’ he said, smiling at Kip.

  Kip held the cage up, the bird chirping when the sun streamed through the bars. It tested its wings in a flurry, expanding them as far as its prison would allow. Enos lifted the small gate and the bird darted out so quickly it was nearly invisible.

  Its black head bobbed and its grey wings fluttered as it rose into an expanse of blue. Up and up it went until it was gone, disappearing over rooftops and obscured by the sun.

  Now it was just this room, and this house, and the portrait that stared, and the fire that danced.

  Kip reached into his bag on the armchair, shuffling through a collection of vials and small leather pouches.

  One pocket held a reliquary.

  Kip pulled out a silver bracelet that caught the light. Enos used to wear it constantly. It went everywhere he went. A lock of black hair tied in a bundle with a piece of red string wrapped around the bracelet.

  Leave these things here. They’ll be safe.

  He pulled out a sack made of purple-stained leather and loosened the tie. Opening it carefully, he caught the smell of the powder, a mix of iron and char.

  Kip grabbed a generous handful and dusted his lower body with it. The dust that fell away evaporated before it hit the floor, but he knew it was still there, like water molecules in the air. Dusting off his hands, he stepped forward into the hearth.

  The fire roared around him, flames licked at his legs, trying to consume this new fuel but with no luck. The orange flame sparked to blue as it wrapped around him.

  He put his palms against the stone back of the hearth and pushed. A gust of air rushed over him; the fire sputtered fitfully. Kip stepped through the hearth into a long hallway that sloped down.

  It was low enough that he had to bend his head slightly. Placing a palm on the ceiling, he ran his hand along the surface above as he walked forward. Branches broke out of the stone, the roots of the tree that expanded to the rest of the house.

  A wooden staircase loomed ahead. It was a platform looking down on his basement laboratory, two short flights down to a dirt floor. He descended them and felt an odd comfort when his feet touched the earth.

  Heavy work tables lined the walls of the room, each station packed with devices and equipment. Various bronze mortars, crucibles, beakers, and burners crowded the tables. A rack overflowed with ingredients of every kind; powders and liquids, bits of metal, and trapped gases. Candles of varying heights cropped up in any available space, melted onto the wood surface.

  His short life’s work. But all that work had been pushed aside for a newcomer, something that grew from the earth itself.

  A well.

  The rough and unfinished stone reminded him of the work of pagans. He thought of standing stones, and cairns, and all the mysterious structures that had sprung up in this world, so common now that people passed them on the way to market without a second glance.

  This well was not common; the gaping hole in his basement that leaked a constant chill. It made him sick to look at it, to know he created something not with his talent or ingenuity, but with pure focused desire. What spoke through him to make such a thing possible? What had he manifested with his longing?

  He was the master of Alchemy House, after all, not Magic House. There was supposed to be an order to his world. Logical. Precise. Not the unknown realm of dreams and the power of the mages. Kip no longer believed in such things. They had faded from the world like a giant going to sleep.

  But here was a giant awake again.

  He looked down into the black hole, just as he did every night. It pulled him in, bending his neck with an invisible weight until he thought he would fall. His fingers brushed the rough stone, its texture now mapped to his body. He knew every piece of the well, every sensation it offered. The coldness of the stone. The smell of the air that breathed slowly from the depths, clean and cold like a breeze that comes over a hill in autumn, shaking the leaves and driving out any last bit of summer. Just like a fall chill, it triggered the same emotions.

  “Why?” Kip asked, his voice cracking.

  And then came a reply.

  “Hunger,” the ice voice said. The voice that first spoke three months ago, coming to him in a dream. It was the same dream that brought forth the well. Kip sensed its approach, or at least it was easy to think that now. He imagined it coming for him, pushing back layer after layer of the veil between this world and the next.

  “Down here there’s a hunger, boy.”

  “Why did you find me?”

  “Because there is life and death, and then something in-between. You must know you’re not truly alive? You’re Kip of the In-between, who seeks out his bed so that he can dream, who prays to Morpheus with each breath. You called to me as a child of the In-between.

  “No amount of alchemical tinkering has that power. You can move your elements and rearrange a drop of sand on a beach, but down here, that’s where there’s true power.”

  “I’m going to bring him back.”

  “No one comes back, boy.”

  “I will divine a method…”

  “No.”

  “Then why did you find me? What was the point?”

  “To know you better, to see the world above. I can feel a city move around you. How can you stand its movement, so constant and pitiless? Down here there’s room. You could walk for a day without seeing another. You could walk for one hundred days and only see the gray expanse, and the lightning clouds.”

  A pause. There were many pauses when he communicated with the well, drawn out and peaceful. The voice spoke again.

  “What is that pretty glint?”

  Kip looked down at his wrist and the bracelet there. It was the twin to Enos’s.

  “I made two bracelets. They’re made of lodestone incased in iron. They're attracted to each other.”

  He remembered the sensation, the merest tug of the wrist as one bracelet pulled towards the other. It worked from great distances, strong enough that he and Enos could find each other wherever they might be. Kip remembered the subtle gravity, pulling him left here and right there, down this street and up that alleyway.

  “Does it still pull at your wrist?”

  It did, even now. Kip could feel the other bracelet in his bag upstairs, constantly nagging.

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me one true thing about him so that I may find him down here.”

  “He liked Boccherini.”

  “What is that?”

  “It’s music. Well, it was a person who composed music.”

  “What else?”

  “He pronounced ‘cacophony’ wrong.”

  There was the rhythmic, barely audible, drumbeat again. It rose from the well like water, filling the hole and spilling over. Kip swam in the noise, never sure if it occupied his ears or his mind. Either way, it pulled him closer, invited him to look more keenly into the darkness.

  “He liked to build ships in bottles.”

  Another pause.

  “Yes,” the gravel-voice said. “He’s down here. I can smell him. But your description is sparse. Why do you distill things down to such basic elements? Petty likes and dislikes?”

  That’s what Alchemists do, Kip wanted to say. We distill and simplify and break apart the elements of the world. All the same, he felt like a fool, talking about Boccherini and cacophony when there was so much else to say. But if he started, would he be able to stop?

  “Why do you come here to think about death?”

  “Death scatters the elements of the body, devolving them. If I can follow the process backwards, reclaim the elements, I could bring something back.”

  “Like the wolf?”

  Kip thought of the ghostly horror, the tortured howls that he’d brought back into the world.

  “That…that was just an echo of the wolf. Not the real thing. But, in theor
y—”

  The voice pushed on. “And you would do this for Enos?”

  I tried, Kip thought. It doesn’t work.

  The well could hear him, penetrating the workings of his mind as it made him remember.

  “How did you try?”

  Kip thought of the countless experiments. He’d used his little Enos reliquary. Tortured each object to release some essence, something he could hold on to. He’d burned things with fire and acid, broken them, shattered them. All the work had gotten him nothing, nothing but smoke.

  Again, the voice in the well seemed to experience this memory with him, always in step with his thoughts.

  “Why couldn’t you bring him back?”

  “Four elements make up all things: earth, wind, water, fire, each with their chemical analog. But tracing the patterns of something… so wonderful, so alive, it might be impossible. You can’t reform a shattered crystal. It’s too fine. The human body is too complex.”

  “The boy wants to reverse the process if he can? Follow the footprints back up the trail?”

  He could have screamed his answer, but left it at a single, softly-spoken word. “Yes.”

  “What is the end goal? When all the notes run together, what is the symphony?”

  The Soul of All Things, Kip thought.

  “And what is that?”

  “It’s the end of the journey,” he said with reverence. “The goal of every Alchemist throughout history, to find the Primal Element, the thing common to all substances. The element that would allow someone to reshape the world.”

  Cold air swelled from the well, an exhaling of breath; clean and pure but still dead. A vision appeared, some far-away world or forgotten memory. It warbled to life in front of Kip as if viewed through rippled glass; a gray world of towering stones and scattered lights in the sky.

  A silhouette sat against the churning horizon, a young man standing still and watching Kip, unkempt raven hair moved by a breeze.

  He stretched out his hand to touch this strange offering but it vanished, collapsing to a pinpoint of light before disappearing.

  “How perfect,” the voice mused, “The Soul of All Things.”

  The presence seemed to like that, thinking on it for a moment.

  “Are other humans like you, so unreachable?”

  “I don’t know,” Kip said.

  And then the question that the voice always came back to.

  “What does it feel like to be alive?”

  Something about the repeated question alarmed him. There was a threat wrapped in it, no matter how politely the voice asked.

  “I have to go. It’s late.”

  “No.”

  Kip started to back away, his fingers slipping from the stone of the well.

  “What does blood feel like? Is the body an open wound? Why else does it bleed from the inside?”

  Kip placed one foot on the stairs. He glanced up to see the light of the fire, reflecting off the walls of the hallway and catching in the leaves and branches that hung above. Were they growing even now, before his eyes?

  “If blood is a liquid, can you drink it? What does it taste like?”

  The drumming returned, louder now and more steady. It filled his ears and then his head. Its low rumble felt organic; like an extension of his body.

  Boom. Boom. Boom.

  Still Kip didn’t allow himself to be afraid. He’d built a dam inside himself, walling off all the important bits, protecting them from petty hurts, from anxiety, from fear…

  But those drums.

  Kip’s hand slipped from the railing and fell to his side. His foot came off the stair and rested back on the dirt floor, a small cloud lifted into the air. He suddenly wanted to feel the dirt between his toes, pushing between each digit. He wanted to feel the strange leaves on his face, battering him as he ran through a jungle, straight into the arms of the ashen limbs.

  Boom. Boom. Boom.

  The voice was at its most silken now, almost a hiss, and less human-sounding than ever. Kip wondered at the fact that he could even understand it.

  “You are organic, I know that now. I can see it. I can see the blush on your face where the blood gathers. There are small blue veins that carry it to the farthest reaches of your body.

  “What if you were punctured, would it run like sap from a tree? How much sap could you lose before you had to join me down here? Down here, with your raven-haired Boccherini-lover.”

  Kip stepped forward. Curse and bother the world behind him, the fragile and impotent world of men, with its achievements measured in the smallest increments. The world moved at a snail’s pace, and with equal grace; sludging from small movement to small movement.

  This world that killed Enos, crushed him under the wheel of ignorance. Kip thought of his bed and the nights of focused meditation, wishing and wishing until he thought his skull would crack open, wishing that things could be different, that they could go back to what they’d been.

  If only his skull could crack and bring forth his own Athena; his Enos.

  The drumbeat reached a crescendo and hammered all other thoughts from his mind. Only one voice remained in the coming darkness.

  “What does it feel like to be alive?”

  4

  Kip awoke to bird song. It penetrated the layers of his dream, cutting through the darkness with clear sound. He opened his eyes to see swaying branches above him and sunlight breaking through a mesh of leaves.

  He’d fallen asleep next to the well again. Kip brought his hand to his face and covered his eyes, massaging his temples. Sleep called him again, offering to drag him back down, but the hard dirt floor said otherwise.

  You could stay here, the well offered. The voice itself was silent, never one to come out during the day, but Kip felt its presence.

  Stay here.

  Kip shifted his body and sat up with a groan. He rolled onto his knees and then used the well as a prop to pull himself up. The bird was still hyperventilating, singing its fool head off. He followed the sound up the stairs and then back through the hearth, the fire long extinguished. Kip pulled the stone panel shut, then stepped over the bed of ash in the fireplace and into the living room.

  He heard the clatter of Shadow in the kitchen, no doubt preparing some Shadow-ish breakfast, which usually ended in something burnt and broken crockery. He was about to join Shadow when a knock at the door stopped him.

  A timid knock, Kip wondered if he had even heard until it was repeated. He went to the front door and opened it, pulling in a draft of air.

  A girl stood on the doorstep. Her silver-white hair hung in her face, nearly hiding blue eyes with dark circles under them. She wore a faded dress that hung loosely on her body. She looked like she was hiding even when standing right in front of him, as if she were in retreat.

  Clover Blackmoor, daughter of the master of Magic House; Lord Francis Blackmoor. She was a mute. Kip felt a sudden pain being in her presence as if he too wanted to shrink away. He found it difficult to meet her eyes, which lay flat on her face like two shallow pools. If there was a depth beneath them, it was unknowable.

  Her pale hands clutched a letter with a wax seal. She offered the letter to Kip, as if initiating some planned ceremony. He followed her lead, reaching out with both hands and took it. Clover hesitated before letting go, a moment passed before she surrendered the letter, then her hands fell away.

  “Thank you,” Kip said. “It’s Clover, isn’t it?”

  The girl brought one hand up to the side of Kip’s face and held it there. So random was the gesture that Kip didn’t know how to react. He stood there, letting her cradle his cheek, feeling the warmth of her palm.

  Her eyes flared suddenly, something penetrating the blue; a splinter of purple light. Her hand flicked up to Kip’s head and she snatched a single strand of hair from his scalp.

  “Hey!”

  He wanted to say more but she had already turned away in a pale whirl, hurrying down the steps, and walking quickly u
p the street, before disappearing into the bustle of the London morning.

  Kip turned the letter in his hands, felt the fineness of the paper, ran his thumb over the wax seal of Magic House – an image of two manticores locked in combat.

  It was a rare occasion that he heard from Lord Francis Blackmoor. They were acquaintances due to their positions, but had never been close. There was an iciness to the old man, hidden just below the surface of his charm. Perhaps magic made one aloof.

  Letters can wait, he thought, as he slipped it into his vest pocket, and went to the kitchen.

  Shadow was there trying to navigate a steaming teapot while not putting down the book he was reading. He spoke without looking up from his work.

  “Shadow made ceylon in Brown Betty,” he said proudly, gesturing to the teapot, by tilting his head at an odd angle. He seemed endlessly proud of making tea, as if it were more than hot water poured over leaves.

  Kip pulled out one of the kitchen chairs and sat in it heavily, upsetting a few stray pawns from the chessboard on the table. One rolled to the table’s edge and Kip stopped it with a single finger, letting it rest, nearly teetering over.

  “Shadow's reading about human stuff,” Shadow said, gesturing to the spine of his book. His pleasant child-like voice was always so musical, especially in the morning. Kip reached out and grabbed the book.

  “The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins. Is it good?”

  “Cracking good!” Shadow said, extending a clawed hand, opening and closing his fist, signaling he wanted it back. Kip obliged.

  “What’s it about?”

  “Human stuff…” Shadow mumbled as he buried his face between the pages. His blue eyes cast a soft glow on the words below.

  “Do you like ‘human stuff’?”

  “Yeah, Shadow likes all stuff…well, most stuff.”

  “Do you like mysterious letters?”

  Kip slipped the envelope from his pocket and cut through the seal with a butter knife. A plume of blue dust rose into the air, escaping the folds of the envelope. As the dust spread, it caught the light through the window and shimmered slightly before disappearing. The theatrics of Magic House, he thought; couch all things in mystery.