Alchemy of Shadows

by David L Burkhead

  The young woman stepped clear of the doorway, letting the door close behind her before turning round to face forward. Only my own prompt step back prevented her from colliding with me.

  “Whoa!” Some brown liquid sloshed out of her cup. “Oops. My bad.”

  Waves of dark hair framed her olive-brown face. Her eyes were the color of dark chocolate. A subtle use of gloss darkened and added shine to her lips. I saw no other makeup. Her T-shirt was blazoned with the logo of some overly loud band barely discernible above the knot. Like most people, she was taller than me, but only by a few inches.

  I stood stunned. She was absolutely the loveliest young woman I had seen in decades.

  “It’s okay,” I said at last.

  “You here for the party?” She frowned. “No. Wait. Just moving in?”

  “Yes, I...”

  “That’s an awfully big load. Hang on.”

  She opened the door a crack and stuck her head through. “Hey, Jeff. Fresh meat. Could use some help with his luggage.”

  She pulled back and another head appeared in the doorway, several inches higher than hers. The man had likewise had olive brown skin, his a shade darker than the young woman, his eyes a shade lighter. He wore his hair cropped short. The resemblance of his features to hers spoke of close family ties.

  “Come on, Becki, they’re just about to start...”

  “Don’t care. Guy needs a hand. Look at him. That suitcase is almost as big as he is.”

  She looked at me and an expression of chagrin crossed her face. “Oh, I’m sorry. No offense.”

  I forced a lopsided smile. “None taken.”

  “So, come on, Jeff. Help the guy out.”

  “Becki, I...”

  She grinned. “I’ll owe you a solid.”

  Jeff’s eyebrows raised. “You’ll owe me? What about him?”

  “I’m asking. He’s being entirely too shy to ask.”

  She was wrong. I am not shy. I simply choose to keep a distance between myself and people so very much younger than I am. Saves trouble in the long run.

  Jeff pushed the door the rest of the way open and stepped through. “Fine.”

  Jeff stood a bit over six feet. I could not guess his weight with the baggy sweatshirt sporting the logo for the IUPUI Jaguars—dressing for comfort rather than appearance.—but he was big. Despite the differences in their sizes, there seemed to be a certain similarity in their faces. The shape of the nose, the curve of the lower lip, they shared that.

  “So,” Jeff said, nodding at my suitcase. “Need help with that?”

  “No,” I said, my voice soft, “I’m fine.”

  Jeff grinned. “I insist. Becki will beat me with a stick if I don’t.”

  Becki punched Jeff in the arm.

  I found myself returning his grin. “Wouldn’t want that. So, please.”

  I dragged the suitcase up the last step and set it on the landing.

  Jeff reached out a huge hand. I let go of the handle. Jeff picked up the suitcase as though it were empty. He paused for a moment then turned to Becki. "That loser boyfriend of yours called. He said he'd be late."

  "Jeff!"

  "Hey, I calls 'em as I sees 'em." He turned to me. “Which room?”

  “Three Oh Eight,” I said.

  Becki punched Jeff in the arm again.

  “Where are your manners? Introduce yourself.” She turned to me. “I’m Rebecca Pierce, Becki to my friends. This is my brother Jeff, dumbass to people who know him.” She grinned.

  “I’m Adrian Jaeger,” I said. “Ms. Pierce. Mr. Pierce.”

  “Oooh, all formal,” Becki grinned. “Don’t be silly. Ms. Pierce is my mother. Becki.”

  “I dunno,” Jeff said. “I kind of like ‘Mr. Pierce.’”

  “Be nice, Jeff,” Becki said. “Or I’ll tell Mom about Candy.”

  I watched the byplay with amusement. I’d seen so many dysfunctional families over the years, so many youngsters steeped in selfishness that it was refreshing to see a brother and sister that not only openly cared for each other but were kind and helpful to a complete stranger.

  Jeff put his foot on the first step of the stairs up. “Three Oh Eight is up here.”

  I nodded and gestured for him to lead the way.

  #

  Three Oh Eight was a small one-bedroom apartment. More than I needed, really but neither of the studios in this property were available. And I needed an upper floor to safely vent fumes.

  The window looked out over the parking lot and to the twin building across the lot. Not the most charming of views.

  “Well,” Becki said. “This place is...empty.”

  Jeff set my suitcase down. “This it?”

  “Got another suitcase down in the car,” I said. “And a couple of boxes but...”

  “Nonsense,” Becki said. “Jeff will be happy to...”

  Jeff growled.

  “Really,” I said. “I can get it.”

  Jeff waved a hand. “Don’t mind us. Becki is always volunteering me for stuff.”

  “And you always do it too for your little sister.” Becki clutched her hands together in front of her throat, tilted her head to the side, and batted her eyes. “Please?”

  I covered up laughter with forced coughing.

  “You might want to get that checked out,” Jeff said but I could see the way he pressed his lips together to suppress his own grin. “Let’s go get your stuff.”

  A few minutes later the last of my modest luggage sat in the middle of the small living room of the apartment.

  “So that’s it,” Becki said.

  “So, can we get back to the party?” Jeff asked.

  “Fine. Fine.” Becki said. She turned toward the door then paused. She looked back. “Why don’t you come with us?”

  I smiled. “Thanks, but I don’t think so. I’ve got to get settled in here.”

  “Where you gonna sleep?” Becki spread her arms and waved them from side to side. “Unless you’ve got a bed tucked into one of those suitcases...”

  I shrugged. “I’ve slept in worse. Really, I’ll be fine. Probably pick up a mattress at a thrift store or something tomorrow.”

  I ushered Becki and Jeff out then turned and sagged back against the door.

  Somehow, without meaning to, it would seem that I had made some friends.

  CHAPTER THREE

  I rested a moment, leaning against the door, then dragged over the larger of my two suitcases. From it I drew a large towel which I rolled and pushed partway into the crack at the bottom of the door. A pack of removable stickers let me cover the peephole in the door. Anyone outside would see simply a dark door. No one in the hallway would question why I kept lights on in my apartment all night.

  Door taken care of, I replaced each of the bulbs in the various fixtures with the brightest LED lights commercially available and made sure every light in the apartment was lit. I covered the windows with the blackout curtains I had in the larger of the two suitcases.

  Why is a grown man, especially one my age, afraid of the dark, you ask? Have you been listening?

  Fatigue threatened to drag my eyelids closed but I shook my head. I still had work to do. The ephemeris on my phone told me that today was the best day to begin work on my elixir. If I missed it now, I would have to wait another month. After using a whole vial to escape the Shadows, I had only a little left. That made me nervous.

  I removed my tools and instruments from the second suitcase. I didn’t have a proper furnace, something else I would have to obtain, but a propane torch and crucible would serve my current needs.

  I set up at the windowsill. An iron tripod supported my crucible. A desk fan blew across the top of the crucible, out the window. I adjusted the fan until I was certain it would carry fumes outside where they would disperse in the night air. In a previous century, odd smells could lead to accusations of witchcraft. In the current century the accusations would be of cooking meth or some other illegal activity.

 
I propped the torch to heat the crucible from below. I removed a scalpel from my kit. Holding my wrist above a glass beaker I hissed as I made a practiced slice. However many times I had done this, it still hurt.

  I watched carefully as the blood poured into the beaker. As the level of the blood in the beaker neared the half-liter mark, I spun the cap one-handed from a dropper vial of elixir. I set the vial down and squeezed the bulb on the dropper. When the level of blood reached the mark in the vial, I quickly applied three drops of elixir to the cut on my wrist. The flow of blood slowed. I set the dropper back into the vial and then ran my finger along the line of the cut to spread the elixir. As my finger wiped away the blood, all that remained was a red line, as of a recently healed wound. By morning even that would be gone.

  I held my hand next to the crucible and judged that it had reached the correct temperature. I poured the blood in a thin stream into the crucible. It hissed and spat and smoke billowed up to stream out the window, driven by the fan. Even with the fan, the smoke made my eyes water and the smell of burning blood made my nose wrinkle.

  I watched the blood boil to a thick tar, then to a black mass. Satisfied, I placed the cover on the crucible and reduced the flame of the propane torch. In time the heat would calcine the blood to a white ash. When done on the first night of the full moon, this ash was the Philosopher's Stone, and the first ingredient of the Elixir of Life.

  While waiting for the process to run its course, I set about unpacking. I had little enough, really. Clothes appropriate to a person of my assumed status. Some basic toiletries. And such of my alchemical apparatus as was easily portable.

  The last items to unpack, a rolled-up foam camping pad and a sleeping bag, provided bedding that was pure heaven compared to the straw-covered dirt floors with which I had grown up.

  About midnight, the calcining of my blood finished. I shut off the torch and picked up the crucible with a heavy welder’s glove. I used a platinum laboratory spatula to scrape the white ash out of the crucible and into a Pyrex baking dish and then set the crucible back in its tripod. I spread the ash across the bottom of the dish where it quickly cooled. I scraped the cooled ash to one corner of the dish, placed a glass funnel into a glass bottle, and slowly poured the ash into the bottle. I sealed the bottle with a glass stopper and set it on a top shelf in the apartment’s kitchen where it would wait while I prepared the other ingredients, one by one, to make the elixir.

  After cleaning up from my preparations, I took a quick shower then spread my pad and sleeping bag in the small bedroom. I had so much to do in the few days before the semester started.

  On that thought, in the brightly lit room, I drifted off to sleep.

  #

  Courses in technical fields always start with calculus. I have studied introductory calculus at least half a dozen times, three times in formal college classes. I know it better than the instructor at this point.

  The first class in introductory calculus is always a large one, full of eager young freshmen looking forward to a career in engineering or the sciences. I knew from experience that about half of these no longer so eager freshmen would drop the course before the semester was out. More would decide the field was not for them and they would switch to language or liberal arts or, God forbid, to education.

  The professor walked into the door at the bottom of the lecture hall.

  “In arithmetic” he said before he even reached the podium, “you manipulated numbers. In algebra you manipulated variables standing for unknown numbers and you used them to create functions. In calculus, you will manipulate functions and use those manipulations to create new functions.” He turned and began drawing a chart on the whiteboard.

  Several students near me dove into their backpacks for notebooks, apparently not expecting a substantive lecture on the first day of class. I went through the motions of taking notes while watching the other students in the class.

  A little over half the class consisted of women. Most were eighteen to nineteen, my own claimed age. While I prefer to start a new identity at a claimed age of twenty-one, with identification to match, I did not have an appropriate ID ready for that age when the Shadow had forced me to run. So I used an emergency backup that had not quite matured.

  “You!”

  I turned my attention back to the lecture. The professor was pointing at me.

  “Yes, sir?”

  He pointed at the whiteboard. On it, he had drawn a curve with a line drawn through it, cutting it at two places.

  “How would we change this—” He pointed at the line “—to more closely approximate the slope of the curve at this point.” He tapped one of the places where the line crossed the curve.

  I knew the answer, of course, but I put some uncertainty into my voice appropriate to the role I played.

  “Move the other point where it crosses closer?”

  “That’s correct. Very good.” He turned back to the board. “You can’t traditionally draw a slope through one point. But what you can do is bring your second point closer and closer to the first. And as the two points get closer and closer, arbitrarily close, together the slope of the line between them gets closer and closer to a particular value. We call this process ‘taking a limit’.” He dropped the marker into the tray and turned to face the students. “We will discuss limits more next time. You can pick up your syllabi on the way out. If you have any questions, my email and office hours are on the syllabus.”

  He walked out the door at the bottom end of the room just as the bell rang.

  I worked my way down the row of seats toward the aisle.

  “Man, that professor’s a hardass,” someone said behind and above me.

  “Maybe,” a familiar voice said. “But I think this is going to be fun.”

  “Fun?” The first voice sounded shocked.

  I turned. In the row behind, Becki was also working her way toward the exit. Her eyes met mine.

  “Adrian! I thought I recognized you.”

  “Ms. Pierce,” I said.

  Becki raised one finger and waggled it from side to side. “Ah ah. What did I tell you?”

  I smiled. “Becki.”

  “Very good,” she said, her voice solemn. “We’ll get you trained yet.”

  We reached the aisle. Becki fell in beside me as we ascended toward the upper level doors. I grabbed two copies of the syllabus from the stand next to the door and handed one to Becki.

  “Where you headed?” She asked after the crowd had thinned slightly.

  “Principles of engineering,” I answered. “You?”

  “Chemistry lab. I have lab before I have lecture. Isn’t that going to be fun?”

  “I’m sure they’ll accommodate that,” I said.

  She laughed. “Oh, you are new at this, aren’t you? Sink or swim. Sink or swim.” She raised a hand in a faint suggestion of a wave. “See you around.”

  I snorted and turned toward the stairs toward the exit. My next class was in another building and I would have to walk briskly if I was to make it on time.

  I cast one quick glance over my shoulder in the direction Becki had gone.

  “Don’t even think about it, Jaeger. Don’t even think about it.”

  I might look like a young man, just entering full adulthood. I maybe even felt like one thanks to a youthful set of hormones, but young I was not. I was an old, old man.

  #

  After a full day of classes I returned to my apartment. Only the calculus professor dove right in with an actual lecture. Most of the classes were typical first day of class sessions: going over the syllabus, what the class would cover, what the expectations were, grading standards, that sort of thing.

  And thought of expectations brought my mind back around to Becki.

  It’s not that I have objections to dalliances—Yes, I know that’s an archaic term—what of it—but I prefer to keep my affairs casual. Look, you’ve read the stories. Immortal or extremely long-lived character whining over having loved
ones age and die? Well, it’s worse than that. I have to leave before it becomes inexplicable that I don’t age but my partners do. Since the Shadows started chasing me I did not dare remain in one place long enough for people to see that I did not age like other men. That would bring them down on me.

  As for love and relationships? The last one I had, the Shadows took my lover and threatened to reveal our affair if I did not surrender to them. That would not have been so bad for me—I was used to leaving and starting over as someone else in another location—but for my lover, in that time and place, it would have been disaster. Possibly lethal disaster.

  #

  Summer 1740

  My feet squished in the mud as I stepped off the boardwalk. I ducked back as a carriage rolled past, then darted across the street. Despite the recent cleansing rain, the town stank of rotting garbage.

  The hammering of the farrier’s forge beat a rhythm in counterpoint to the dull thud of horses’ hooves and the creaking of tack and carriage hardware.

  I saw the clubhouse ahead, the place I had been told to meet. Not a place an unknown such as myself would normally frequent.

  Andrew Johnson, the local surgeon, stood in the shadows of the doorway of the small clubhouse. A broad-brimmed hat shaded his eyes. Within those shadows something seemed odd. I shaded my own eyes and frowned.

  A doctor in England, Ayscough by name, had been experimenting with spectacles of colored glass to correct vision problems. It seemed that Johnson was an adherent as he wore spectacles with dark blue lenses.

  Johnson sneered as he stepped back to clear the doorway and allow me to enter. I walked into the darkened room.

  Shutters covered the windows. As the door closed behind me the room plunged into darkness, relieved only by a single candle.

  “Where’s Paul?” I asked.

  The candle moved. As my eyes adjusted to the dim light I saw that Johnson carried it.

  Johnson brought the candle to where Paul sat bound in a chair, his face lumpen and discolored from beating.

  Rage rose within me but I held it in check. I did not know what was happening and needed to remain calm to learn.