The Alchemaster's Apprentice (3 page)

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Authors: Walter Moers

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Awaiting him when he entered the next passage were three terrifying figures: a Grim Reaper, a Hazelwitch and a Cyclopean Mummy - three of the most dangerous creatures in Zamonia. The chances of encountering all three in one and the same place were just about as remote as being struck simultaneously by a thunderbolt, an asteroid and a blob of bird shit, but Ghoolion didn’t spare them a single glance; he hurried past them unscathed with his cloak billowing out behind him. Fortunately, they were not only dead but stuffed with great skill, one of the Alchemaster’s numerous hobbies being horrifico-taxidermy, or the mummification and stuffing of horrific life forms of all kinds. Several shadowy corners of his domain were populated by these extremely lifelike-looking creatures. No normal person would have cared to bump into them in the dark, or even in broad daylight and in mummified form, but Ghoolion thoroughly enjoyed their silent company and was always adding new specimens to his collection.
Up a spiral stone staircase he hurried, then through a library of mouldering Bookemistic tomes and across a big room filled with dust-sheeted furniture that looked like an array of bulky ghosts in the flickering candlelight. Next came a deserted dining room with flocks of Leathermice
2
engaged in daring aerobatics below its lofty ceiling. Ignoring those grisly lodgers as well, Ghoolion climbed another flight of stone stairs and came out in a draughty chamber lined with cages of all kinds, from aviaries of bamboo or wire to oak dog kennels and bear cages with bars of polished steel. The higher he went, the fiercer the gale that blew in through the window embrasures, making the curtains flap incessantly and stirring up whirlwinds of dust. Every now and then the chimneys emitted moans and howls suggestive of mastiffs being tortured to death in a dungeon.
Ghoolion came eventually to a stone doorway engraved with alchemistic symbols: the entrance to the big laboratory in which he spent most of his time. This, so rumour had it, was where he generated the bad weather that so often prevailed in Malaisea, and where he bred the bacteria and viruses with which he contaminated the local wells, causing influenza epidemics and children’s ailments, whooping cough and nettle-rash. Here stood sacks filled with migraine- and nightmare-inducing pollen from poisonous plants, ready to be sprinkled on the town from the castle windows. Here Ghoolion thought up curses and created Leyden Manikins, purely in order to torture them. Here, too, he composed the ghastly music that issued from his castle at night, depriving the Malaiseans of sleep and sometimes, even, of their wits. Some became so utterly exhausted, it was said, that they found peace at last by hanging themselves.
For Ghoolion was the town’s de facto ruler. He was its uncrowned tyrant, its black heart and sick brain. And its mayor. All the town councillors and all the inhabitants of Malaisea were merely puppets dangling from strings operated by the Alchemaster-in-Chief.
Ghoolion’s Laboratory
E
cho did not wake up until Ghoolion extricated him from the depths of his black cloak. Sleepily, the little Crat surveyed his surroundings. The remarkable laboratory was festively illuminated by numerous candles burning amid retorts and iron cauldrons, on stacks of books and in many-branched candelabra, which cast long shadows over its walls. The air was filled with a chorus of long-drawn-out sighs and groans, but Echo couldn’t see any living creature capable of producing such sounds, so he attributed them to the wind blowing in through the windows.
The laboratory was situated on the top floor of the castle. Suspended above a coal fire in the middle of the room was a gigantic copper cauldron black with soot, and the soup simmering within it created fat bubbles that gave off a noisome stench. The crooked walls were partly concealed by rickety wooden shelves laden with books and scientific instruments, scrolls of parchment and stuffed animals.
Hanging here and there, too, were more of Ghoolion’s disaster paintings, slates covered with alchemistic symbols and mathematical diagrams, and maps illustrating astronomical constellations. Years of smoke and chemical fumes had stained the vaulted ceiling and warped it into a dark, undulating expanse of timber. Dangling from it on cords and chains were planetary and lunar globes, astronomical measuring instruments and stuffed birds and reptiles. Ancient tomes with gnarled leather covers and tarnished metal clasps were lying around all over the place, many with handwritten notes protruding from their dusty, cobwebby pages. Among them stood countless glass vessels of every size and shape, some empty, some filled with fluids or powders of various hues, and others occupied by Leyden Manikins tapping vainly on the walls of their transparent prisons. The rusty alchemical furnace that dominated this whole chaotic scene resembled an ironclad warrior standing guard over a battlefield.
Echo didn’t know where to look and what to fear the most when Ghoolion put him down on the floor. He had never seen so many astonishing and menacing objects under one roof. When he caught sight of a stuffed but lifelike Nanofox baring its teeth at him from one of the lower shelves, he arched his back and hissed with his tail fluffed out like a flue brush.
Ghoolion laughed. ‘He can’t hurt you any more,’ he said. ‘I gutted him, rendered him down for his fat, stuffed him with sawdust and wood shavings, and sewed him up again - it took me seven hundred stitches. I had to insert a wire armature in his jaw to reproduce the facial expression. That snarl of yours tells me I made a good job of it.’
Echo shuddered at the thought that the Alchemaster would gut him, extract his fat and stuff him with sawdust when the next full moon came round. He might even wire him up with his tail erect and his back arched in memory of this moment.
‘Now for our contract,’ said Ghoolion, and he withdrew a sheet of parchment covered with alchemistic symbols from a stack of documents. Taking pen and ink, he proceeded to scrawl on the back of it, which was blank. Echo found it far from pleasurable to watch him drawing up the contract. The Alchemaster was muttering to himself with such glee as he wrote, and his eyes were glittering with such undisguised malevolence, that the terms of the contract could hardly be to his, Echo’s, advantage. All he caught were phrases such as ‘irrevocably committed’, ‘indissolubly binding’, ‘legally enforceable’ and the like. In fact, however, he couldn’t have cared less how unreasonable Ghoolion’s terms were - just as long as he got something to eat in the very near future.
‘There,’ Ghoolion said at last. ‘Now sign!’
He held out a red ink pad. Echo applied his paw, first to the pad and then to the foot of the document. Before he could even glance at the wording, Ghoolion snatched the parchment away and stowed it in a drawer.
‘Take a look around,’ he commanded, indicating the room with a dramatic gesture. ‘This is your new home - the last you’ll ever have in your life, so I advise you to savour every moment. Imagine you’re dying, but painlessly, without the disagreeable symptoms of some terrible wasting disease. You can eat what you like while you’re dying. Consider yourself lucky! Very few creatures are granted such a pleasant end. I’ll try to make it as quick and painless as possible when the moment comes. I’m an expert.’ He gazed at his bony hand, which he had raised like an executioner showing his victim the lethal implement. ‘Now let’s start fattening you up right away. We mustn’t waste another moment of your precious time.’
Ghoolion’s heartless words gave Echo the shivers, but he did as he was told and took a look at his new - and very last! - home, trying to control his emotions and fears so as not to expose himself to any more of the Alchemaster’s barbed remarks. He wanted to study every detail of his surroundings because he knew from experience that fear subsides more quickly the more you look your fears in the face.
It struck him, as he surveyed the room, that the shadows on the walls were moving. The bulky shadow of the alchemical furnace, which had loomed over a bookcase a moment earlier, was now slanting across a grey slate covered with mathematical formulae. How could that be? Did the shadows in Ghoolion’s domain lead a life of their own? To Echo, anything seemed possible in this weirdest of all the buildings in Malaisea. But Crats are level-headed creatures, so he set about getting to the bottom of the mystery. Did the light sources move by mechanical means? Cautiously, he clambered over some worm-eaten books, made his way between two stacks of time-yellowed documents and squeezed past some big glass bottles thick with dust. Nearer and nearer he crept to one of the candles, only to be brought up short by a magnifying glass the size of a soup plate. He froze. His determination to show no sign of fear evaporated, for the sight that confronted him through the dirty lens was so bewildering, so startling and unreal, that it put all the laboratory’s other sensations in the shade: he saw a grotesquely magnified candle with a pain-racked face streaked with waxen tears. To his utter consternation, Echo saw that it was almost imperceptibly propelling itself along at a snail’s pace, sobbing and sighing as it went.

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