by Loren Rhoads           

Alondra DeCourval placed the letter on the shrine at the center of her lab equipment.  At the shrine’s heart stood a photograph of her as a girl with Victor on King Suryavarman’s mausoleum at Angkor Wat, eyes shielded against the rising sun.  It had been more than a decade since her guardian had been strong enough for that climb.

Her shrine consisted of knickknacks he’d bought her on their travels and things she’d stolen from his house when his sons threw her out:  the skeletal brujo from Oaxaca, a memento mori leached of amusement now; a gold-backed brush twined with strands of his silver hair; alchemical books from his library.  Just trash, really, unable to embody all she was losing.

Spite tempted her to fling it all into the furnace, especially the new letter from Victor’s oldest son.  Michael wrote that his father was completely bedridden now; dazed from the blood-thinners, Victor was too unsteady on his feet to risk a fall.  The old man asked for her, but Michael didn’t encourage her to come.  In Victor’s final days, his sons wanted him for themselves.

Alondra slumped on her work stool.  Today was the fortieth day since she began this last-ditch effort to save Victor’s life.  If she couldn’t work the magic, Victor would die.  How could she live without him?

Though she’d asked the question with increasing frequency in recent days, the answer remained stunned silence.  Victor had taken her in as a teenager, protected her from her family, shielded her from the world.  He gave her a home, until his sons made her unwelcome. He’d been everything to her:  tutor, protector, confidant, father, best friend.  When he was gone, she wouldn’t even have his name.  Contemplating her existence after his death made her feel that someone threatened to peel away her skin.

Exhausted, Alondra pulled on asbestos gloves to open the furnace.  Inside, the fire burned low, a baleful red glare.  She removed the clumsy gloves and picked up the three-foot tongs to lift out the crucible and its precious contents.

The majisterium had progressed through all the steps:  introduction of the sulfur to the argent-vive, the cold pangs of hatred, the flames of love, courtship, marriage, distillation, and refinement.  The rubedo inside the crucible was the final step.  Forty days of fasting and privation boiled down to this moment.

Alondra wondered if she should have dressed more appropriately, something in keeping with the solemn grandeur of the occasion.  Instead of an alchemist’s robe, she wore jeans that hadn’t seen a washing machine in weeks and a handmade green sweater unraveling at its hem.

The tongs slipped.  She lost her grip on the bulbous crucible.  It dropped to the concrete floor and cracked along its seam.

As Alondra watched the majisterium spatter, curses scorched her thoughts.  Then the prima materia ate through the tops of her clogs to gnaw her feet.  She collapsed to the floor to tear off her shoes.  Only the tiniest droplets had reached her skin, but she had no time to worry about them.  The concrete steamed as the universal solvent ate its way through the floor.

 Alondra snatched up an asbestos glove.  She used one of the crucible fragments to collect up the solvent, scooping it back into the biggest section of the broken vessel.  The floor had to be stabilized now, or she, her equipment, and the whole debacle would tumble down into the sculptor’s studio below.

When further disaster had been averted, Alondra treated her poor feet.  Blisters streaked her skin.  She’d bear the scars the rest of her life, talismans of failure.

Fury swept through her:  that someone so necessary as Victor should die, that she was far too stupid to rescue him.

It didn’t matter that winter punished Prague; she had to get out of the lab.  Anything was better than spending another hour amidst the fumes inside.  Alondra bundled up as best she could with three pairs of socks to pad her blistered feet and two pairs of gloves to ward off frostbite.  She braided her red hair and stuffed it under a gray wool cap.  Shouldering into her wolf fur coat, Alondra fled the Malá Strana.

*

Throughout her time in Prague, she’d meant to visit Kafka’s grave.  He understood futility like no one else.

As Alondra kicked through the crystallized snowdrifts, her thoughts circled back to Victor in England.  Tears prickled her eyes.  She wiped them away before they froze and blinded her.

For forty days, she had not interacted with another human being.  Abstaining from sex had been easy in this city where she knew no one but her landlord and the thief who’d procured the equipment for the work.  Perhaps that was where the fault lay:  her failure had been insufficient bribery to purchase Emperor Rudolf’s treasures to stock her lab.  The taint of theft could have corrupted her results.  She could blame her desperation and haste that the universal solvent had not transmuted.

If John Dee’s furnace in the collection of the British Museum had been reparable, she wouldn’t have sunk to theft.  If she’d had any option at all…but Victor’s glass was almost run.  Time was too short for anything but desperate measures.

She gazed at Kafka’s pink granite obelisk.  Buried with his mother and hated father:  how that must rankle in whatever afterlife the author had flown to.  She wondered if she was doomed to be buried alongside her own blood kin.

Somewhere in the winter graveyard, a man shouted. “Kam jdete?”

Alondra turned.  An elderly man shuffled through the snow toward her.  She realized he must have shouted at her several times.

“Are you crazy?” he demanded in Czech.  That much she understood.  Her landlord often screamed it through her locked door.

The graveyard’s caretaker harangued her, shivering and rubbing his hands.  Eventually, Alondra grasped that he meant it was too cold for any sane person to wander the graveyard.

He paused, clearly expecting an apology.  Alondra opened her mouth, but her voice -- after forty days of silence -- refused to oblige.  Even if she’d spoken his language, there was no arguing with Czechs.  She wondered where Victor’s grave would be, who would chase her away from it.  She gestured she was mute.

Disgusted, the caretaker shook his head and waved her toward the exit.  He had clearly decided she was deaf, too.

Pain blossomed in her chest, jagged and cold.  Suddenly, she had to run.  Encumbered by the heavy fur coat and her blistered feet, Alondra bolted out of the cemetery, away from the dead, dodging traffic as she crossed the road, fleeing into the metro station.  She paid her fare and found herself, swaying, on the edge of the platform, breathing the sharp scent of electricity and steel.

People stared at her -- the crazed redhead in the expensive fur coat.  In the Malá Strana, below the old castle, women were wealthy and fashionable.  They looked at her coat with measuring eyes, craving their own.  Out here in the suburbs, the coat represented blessings that the fall of Communism never bestowed.  Alondra wondered if someone would stop her from jumping if only to salvage her coat.

A light appeared in the tunnel, stabbing through the shadows as it grew nearer.  To her own surprise, Alondra stepped away from the platform’s edge and watched the train arrive.  She could not kill herself.  Her death would hasten Victor’s, take away a pillar that supported his will to live.  As long as he knew she existed somewhere in the world, he wouldn’t give up.  She couldn’t destroy him by hurling herself prematurely into the maw of death.

*

Watching people on the subway chat and flirt or ignore each other, Alondra ached.   How rootless she would soon be.  With Victor vanished all that she thought of as home.  The future spooled out ahead of her without goals, without friends, without refuge.

She rode the metro until she could stand it no longer.  Then she found herself in an unfamiliar neighborhood.  Grand old apartment buildings lined the street, built in the proud days before the Soviet tanks arrived and Prague rolled over to yet another conqueror.  People hurried past, hunched against the bitter wind in patched coats.  Alondra wasn’t sure of the hour.  She dreaded opening herself enough to taste the wind, in case it carried tidings of death.

The only unshuttered businesses were bars.  Steamed windows reduced the camaraderie within to impressionist splotches of color.  Alondra drifted from window to window like a ghost.

Lightning split the gray sky and hailstones spilled out.  Ice stung her upturned face.  Alondra dodged into the doorway of a darkened hardware shop, shivering.

Hailstones big as walnuts pounded down against the pot-holed pavement.  If one of those crowned her, it was quite possible she’d freeze to death in the street.  Someone might rob her corpse and she would just vanish and Victor would never know.  She trembled, half-tempted.

Romantic despair aside, she had no idea which direction led to the subway station, nor where it lay in relation to the Malá Strana and her lab.  She was entirely lost.

Tipping her head back, she opened her heart to the storm.

Thunder rumbled directly overhead, echoing off the buildings.  Lightning illuminated a gateway across the street, two pillars topped by a wooden banner.  Across it, a monkey rode a terrified mule.  Each of them had a single eye, the other socket pierced and empty.

The first thing Victor taught her about magic was to take everything as it came.  If you let yourself feel surprised, magic ceased to work.  You had to accept signs from the universe and move forward.  Without leaps of faith, nothing was ever accomplished.

Wind rushed along the street, sweeping away the hail.  Alondra ran from her shelter, through the gate beneath the monkey and the mule, past a garden of snow-drifted tables, into a tavern.

A fireplace in the center of the room flung off enough heat to make the room waver.  Alondra marched past half a dozen vacant tables and pointed at the blue bottle behind the bar.

“Absinth?” the bartender asked.  He said something in Czech that seemed to mean:  “Are you sure?”

Alondra nodded.

He placed a cordial glass of sapphire liquid in front of her.  Alondra slid the wolf fur from her shoulders, folded it across the battered wooden stool beside her, and sat down.

She’d drunk Spanish absinthe on the Ramblas once, on a trip with Victor to Barcelona.  As a child, she’d spied on Victor and the Lodge toasting a success with a century-old bottle of Pernod Fils.  Both those absinthes had been greenish, leaning toward chartreuse.  This Czech “absinth,” with the Anglo patronymic of Hills, was aquamarine only if one felt generous.  Really, it leaned closer to cerulean.

When her fingers closed on the glass, the diamond chip in her ring reacted to the absinth as if it were poisonous.  It sparkled with an audible crackle.  Poisoning herself suited her mood.  Alondra swigged a healthy mouthful.

The absinth tasted like cough syrup, sans syrup.  Fire scorched the back of her throat.  It was hard to analyze the flavor with her alcohol-scalded taste buds.

“Prominte,” Alondra apologized.  It was one of the Czech phrases she had mastered.  In English, she gasped, “Could I have some sugar and water?”

They were the first words she’d spoken aloud in more than a month.  Alondra grimaced at the unfamiliar sound of her voice and rubbed her throat.

The bartender shrugged, not understanding her, but brought a pint glass of tap water, a shaker of sugar, box of matches, and a teaspoon.

Alondra downed enough of the water to quench her smoldering throat.  Then she filled the spoon with sugar, balanced it on the rim of the pint glass, and carefully emptied the cordial of absinth over it.  The Czech absinth didn’t louche the way the Spanish liqueur had.  The teaspoon was not appropriately trowel-shaped, nor was it slotted, but the sugar dissolved enough to make the rocket fuel drinkable.  She stirred the spoon around, then licked it dry.

While she toyed with her cocktail, another patron joined her at the bar.  He greeted the bartender with “Dobry vecer.”  Echoing him, the bartender poured a glass of Becherovka before the man shed his camel overcoat.  Alondra was vaguely aware of the new patron’s interest in her as she finished her absinth and signaled for another.

In French, the new man said, “Vous buvez l’absinthe á la façon Francaise.  Voudriez-vous que je vous montre la méthode Czech?”

“S’il vous plaît,” she agreed.

“Perhaps you will join me at a table?” the man asked in subtly accented English.

Alondra retrieved her coat and the glove that had fallen to the scarred wooden floor.  She trailed the stranger to a wooden trestle table in a room behind the fireplace, where the heat was less fierce.

“I’m called Tanek.”

Until she saw the milk-white of his fingers, Alondra hadn’t realized that he was albino.  She took his hand.  When their palms met, a spark jolted them both.

“So you are in the Work,” he commented dryly as he moved to hold a chair out for her.  Alondra sank into it.  It figured she would stumble upon another practitioner in Prague.  Somehow, they’d always found Victor when he traveled.

Tanek settled down across from her and removed the mink hat that shaded his face.  His head was very narrow beneath ice-white hair.  Small hexagonal glasses magnified his pink eyes.

Alondra remembered her manners and introduced herself.

His expression warmed.  “I thought you looked familiar.  That red hair is quite distinctive.  We met -- years ago -- in Cairo.  You were traveling with Victor Lockwood then.  How is old Victor?”

“Dying,” Alondra said abruptly.  She’d made a mistake coming here, meeting this man, breaking her vow of silence.  If things had been at all salvageable, they were entirely ruined now.

“I am so sorry,” Tanek said.  His tone apologized sufficiently for the levity preceding it.  “His passing will be an immense loss to the world.”

Alondra hadn’t considered the world’s loss before.  Her eyes felt suddenly heavy, as if her tears had a strange density.  She blinked hard.

The bartender interrupted further conversation by arriving with their absinth.  He placed an unopened bottle of Hills, a carafe of water, two pint glasses, and the other paraphernalia on the tabletop.

“It doesn’t have the elegance of the French method,” Tanek commented, “but it has the added appeal of danger.  In case drinking 120-proof liquor isn’t enough.”

As he spoke, he broke open the sealed bottle and poured generous double shots of Hill’s Absinth into each pint glass.  Then he heaped a spoon with sugar, dunked it quickly into the absinth, and rested it across the top of the glass.  Striking a match, he set the alcohol-drenched sugar alight.

The absinth burned with an eerie flame, blue as a will o’ the wisp.  Alondra watched the sugar bubble and melt.  When the alcohol was consumed, the flame flickered out.  Tanek stirred the caramelized sugar into the liqueur and diluted the concoction with water from the carafe.

He pushed the box of matches toward her.  “When faced with the loss of someone I love, I find it therapeutic to burn things.”

*

Alondra had no way to measure time in the bright, warm tavern.  The room filled with revelers escaping the storm, grew loud as Pilsners and dinners were consumed.  At some point, Tanek ordered a chicken.  A full bird materialized, redolent of the garlic tucked under its crisped skin.  Alondra fought hard not to devour more than her share.  It tasted like heaven after her long fast of white bread and milk.

If Tanek guessed what she was doing in Prague while her guardian died in London, Alondra appreciated his tact in neglecting to mention it.

He told stories he’d collected up as a Polish expatriate in Prague.  “Did you notice the name of this place as you came in?  U vystrelenyho oka means ‘the shot-out eye.’  It’s named for an old fairytale about escaped circus animals -- the monkey and the mule -- who became highway robbers.  They had quite a career, even after they’d each been partially blinded.  Some say they still own this place.”

She laughed and poured them more absinth.

When she finally pushed away from the table, the room had emptied again.  The bartender pillowed his head on his arms atop the bar.

As she stood, Alondra grabbed for the edge of the table.  The carafe had been emptied of water, but the bottle of Hills was still half-full.  All the absinth she’d drunk swam in her head now, warm blue currents that gave the electric lights iridescent halos.

With drunken precision, she asked, “Excuse me?”

“Certainly.”  Tanek stood politely, swaying, as drunk as she.  Smiling, Alondra wandered in search of the ladies’ room before she braved the frigid winter night.

The darkened hallway telescoped ahead of her like something in a dream.  Alondra strode down it, fascinated by how her legs seemed to have grown.  She felt like one of Dali’s elephants, balancing on spindles.

The alcohol had control of her body, but left her thoughts mischievously clear.  She was in no condition to follow directions home.  Tanek had lived in Prague for several years.  Surely, he’d mastered the labyrinthine streets.  The little albino looked fragile enough that she could fend him off with harsh language, if it came to that.

Alondra pushed opened the door to the toilet and fumbled after the light switch.  She caught a glimpse of her reflection in the chipped mirror, saw the cat’s smile curving her lips.  Amused at herself, Alondra had to admit she was extremely curious to see the albino’s body.  She wondered how she could get herself an invitation.

She grimaced when she noticed that her period had started.  She hoped Tanek wouldn’t mind.

*

Alondra unlocked her rented laboratory by touching the silver ring on her right forefinger to the door.  Over her shoulder, Tanek cooed, “Ooh, lovely,” as he watched her spell unravel.

He followed her into the large attic room.  Moonlight flowed like mercury through the skylight to silver the heaps of lab equipment and make black ghosts of the copper coils.  She’d left one of the gas burners lit.  The alembic atop it bubbled chattily.  In the shadows, the pitted floor didn’t look too bad.

]“It’s as cold in here as a tomb,” Tanek remarked.

Alondra felt her façade collapse.  The horror of it was that the world was a tomb, waiting for everyone to lie down and stop breathing, so that it could cover them over and raise the next generation, more food to feed its insatiable maw.  The horror was that those we love are cut away from us one by one, the torture of a thousand cuts, and we are too stupid or stubborn to die with them, too scared to stop breathing so that we can sink into the earth at their sides.

Tanek led her to the bed and sat her gently down.  As she wept, he pulled the wet boots from her feet.  Tucking the blankets around her legs, he unfastened her coat and draped it over the ladder-back chair at her desk.

When he returned to the bed, he brought the absinth.  Alondra swigged from the bottle, welcoming the fire in her guts.  Liquor trickled from her lips and rolled down into her collar.  Tanek licked it from her skin.  Alondra shivered, remembering lovers gone beyond, but when he leaned away, she reached for him.

“I want to warm you,” Tanek whispered, “then I’ll leave.”

Alondra nodded.  She did not want to be alone in this icy room, left to confront her failures and the specter of death.  When Tanek’s lips crossed hers again, she met them.  The life within her clung to him.  That force wanted a reason to tempt her through the night, even while her mind wondered if it would be better to surrender to the cold.        Tanek cocooned them in the blankets.  To Alondra’s surprise, the heat built quickly inside their cerements.  She was relieved when the albino undressed her.

He was skilled enough to move slowly, to let her responses lead him rather than anticipating her.  When Alondra was ready to join in more actively, he surprised her by reaching out into the icy air to retrieve the bottle of absinth.

The moon had slipped from the skylight so that the sole light in the room came from the burner, a pale blue gas flame as steady as sunlight.

Tanek drank deeply from the bottle before passing it to her.  Alondra struggled against her shroud to sit up enough to drink without spilling.  The absinth tasted less like rocket fuel now and more like wormwood, bitter as tears.

Tanek burrowed beneath the blankets, positioning himself between her thighs.  He wasn’t the first creature to taste her menstrual blood.  His first tentative lick burned her with the traces of absinth on his tongue, before his warm lips kissed the pain away.  Alondra laid back and opened herself to him, riding the currents of pleasure away from this world of death.

*

Eventually, Tanek flung the bedclothes away.  Through slitted eyes, Alondra saw steam rising from his sweat-slicked skin.  He crawled up beside her and fed her a taste of her own blood.

Perhaps it was all the absinth she’d drunk, but her thoughts seemed to clear in a blinding flash.

Tanek licked blood from his lips and said simply, “Gather what you need.”           

It wasn’t so much, really.  She swept the worktable clear of glassware and placed her implements at the cardinal points.  She wrestled the block of lead into place.  As long as she didn’t brain him on it, it would serve as a pillow.

Tanek huddled in the abandoned bed, watching her prepare and keeping himself ready.  Alondra quivered as she stoked the stolen furnace.

The old alchemists had failed because they worked their magics within the dominant paradigm.  The white queen submitted to the red king, forced by rape to relinquish her secrets.  If the roles were reversed, if the participants were equals who came together willingly…  If the red queen mounted the white king and drew from him not the milk of the stars but fluid more essential to the generation of life…

“Now,” Alondra said, setting the broken crucible with the cold globules of the majisterium on the table.

Tanek crawled onto the table, careful not to disorder her arrangement of metals and gems.  When he was ready, he reached a hand out to Alondra and helped her climb up.

The method was precarious.  The floor would have been safer, if she hadn’t littered it with broken beakers.

The old alchemists served greed, either their own or their royal masters’, concentrating on the transmutation of lead to gold.  Alondra cared nothing for riches.  The true work, the creation of the philosopher’s stone, was not for her benefit but for Victor’s.  For the world.  From the start, she’d hoped that purity of heart would bring success, but her single pure heart had tasted only failure.  In this inverted paradigm, a solitary practitioner could not accomplish the union of opposites.

Alondra straddled Tanek and poured the last of the absinth in a circle around them on the slate tabletop.  Tanek struck a match to set it alight.

She gazed down at him.  In the eerie alcohol flame, his eyes weren’t pink but a complicated smoky gray.  The color of Victor’s eyes.  Alondra shuddered, losing her desire.

Tanek reached for her hips, pulling her toward him.  “Quickly, now.  The flame won’t burn forever.”

So she took him there, amidst the quicksilver and sulfur, the diamonds and adamantine.  He spoke the formulas she’d spent so long studying, while she did the physical work of maceration and mixture.

Tanek flung his arms out to grasp the table’s edge, fighting not to finish before the work was complete.  Alondra saw him break the circle of burning absinth.  The alcohol splashed onto his forearm and caught fire.

They were so close now that to stop would leave dangerous energies loose in the mortal plane.  Alondra reached out and wove her fingers between Tanek’s.  The hungry flames encircled her wrist as well.  The alcohol flame burned hot enough to blister flesh.  The pain was the final element, the catalyst that liberated the magic.

Alondra heard herself scream with joy as she felt the spheres align.  The lead block beneath Tanek’s head flared bright yellow.  The magic was complete.

*

Morning dawned cruelly in the attic.  The skylight spared her not at all.  Alondra pulled the covers over her head, but the movement released nausea so vicious that she moved faster than she would’ve thought possible.  Hanging her head over the edge of the bed, she retched repeatedly.  Nothing came up but bile.

Alondra glanced around to be certain she was alone.  The sunlight felt like glass ground into her eyes, but she noted the gold brick had vanished from the work table.            Tanek had used her.  He watched her drink herself stupid, then escorted her home, knowing what she must have been attempting in Prague.  He’d even warned her that he would leave.  She couldn’t curse him for robbing her, since she’d been foolish enough to allow it to happen.

He’d spread the wolf fur coat over the bed to keep her warm.  He’d also moved the ladder-back chair from her desk over beside the bed.  On the chair’s seat, a note leaned against a beaker.

Alondra’s stomach wrenched again, but she fought it down.  Whatever justifications the albino had to offer, she couldn’t read them until she got the hangover knocked down to a manageable level.

She reached into the beaker with her left hand. When her ring contacted the icy water, the diamond did not react at all.  At least Tanek had left her something safe to drink.  Alondra eased into sitting up.

Her head felt halved by the blade of sunlight falling from the skylight.  She vowed to never, ever drink absinthe again.

Clutching the beaker of water like an anchor, she sipped tentatively enough that she’d have time to set it aside if her stomach rebelled.  Instead, the fluid felt like a blessing.  Alondra closed her eyes and drank deeply, satisfying a thirst more profound than any she’d ever known.

The blisters on her wrist and feet itched.  Before she could look to them, something soft bumped against her lip.  Startled, Alondra stared down at the last swallow of water in the beaker.

The Universal Remedy tumbling within could hardly be called a stone, since it was only solid in the loosest physical sense.  Beneath her finger, the philosopher’s stone she’d made felt like gelatin, transparent but for a delicate rainbow sheen.  It would be easy to misplace and all too easy to destroy:  the most precious thing in the world.  Victor’s salvation.

Alondra set the beaker reverently back on the chair, then stretched.  She felt better than she had since the news of Victor’s first heart attack.

The frigid room full of broken glass and chemical odors sobered her slightly.  She’d have to straighten it up, return her key to the landlord, then pack for London.  She tucked Tanek’s farewell note into her coat pocket, so she could read it on the plane.

She hoped Victor’s sons weren’t so eager for their father’s death that they’d keep her from the old man.  Surely Victor would be grateful to be snatched from the brink.

            Alondra hummed to herself and never considered that perhaps her motives weren’t as pure as she wanted to believe.

 *****

"Catalyst" was published in Not One of Us #44 in October 2010. Other Alondra stories have appeared in Wily Writers, Instant City, The Paramental Appreciation Society, and in the books Sins of the Sirens and The Haunted Mansion Project: Year One.