Doctor Illuminatus (16 page)

“Are you quite sure?” he asked, buying just a little more time.

“Quite,” said the butcher with a smile. “I hope the little chap enjoys it.” He laughed. “It’s almost as big as he is.”

Tim thanked the butcher and, taking the bone, went outside.

“There you are, Patch,” he said loudly. “Here’s a lovely big bone . . .” He lowered his voice. “And you can carry it. It’ll teach you to drop me in it by swinging your leg on those flowers.”

The Jack Russell did not say anything but gave Tim a filthy look, reluctantly took hold of the bone in his teeth and, once the lead was untied from the hook, set off after de Loudéac who was, by now, thirty meters away. At the first corner, he dropped the bone in the gutter.

De Loudéac’s next stop was the fishmonger’s stall Tim had seen on market day. He bought a piece of smoked haddock, placing it in his shopping bag with the lambs’ hearts.

Tim bent down to pretend to adjust Sebastian’s collar.

“What next?” he whispered.

“Now, I trust, we shall discover his place of domicile.” But de Loudéac did not head home. He went down a residential side street and stopped outside a house with a polished brass plaque by the door. There were no shop windows to linger at here. Tim and Sebastian had no alternative but to keep on walking, closer and closer to their prey. They were within five meters when de Loudéac took a few steps towards them and vanished down a cobbled passageway. Tim, not daring to follow him, stopped at the house door. The brass plaque read,
Keith Markham BVetMed., DVOphthal., MRCVS
.

“It’s a vet’s!” he exclaimed.

“Let me off the leash,” Sebastian said urgently.

Tim undid the clip. The Jack Russell scampered off down the passageway. Seconds passed. Tim, unsure what to do, grew increasingly worried, glancing down the passageway, seeing nothing but the brick walls of the buildings on either side and a padlocked gate at the end. Then came the unmistakable, hysterical barking of a terrier.

Tim set off down the passageway, walking with as much speed as he thought a middle-aged woman might decently exhibit when looking for her dog.

At the gate, the passageway took a right-angled corner. Tim went round it to find Sebastian, no longer a Jack Russell, standing by a row of trash bins and green garbage bags printed
Incinerate only
.

“De Loudéac was in this place,” he said, “but he dissolved before I got here.”

“Where is he now?” Tim asked.

“I know not.” Sebastian shrugged. “Yet tell me, what did he purchase in the butcher’s shop?”

“Lambs’ hearts. What was he doing here?” Sebastian stepped aside.

“This,” he said.

One of the green bags had been ripped open, its contents spilling out on to the cobbles of the passageway. Tim saw, spread about, the carcass of an old black Labrador-cross-collie dog with a gray muzzle, some offal that must have been the result of several veterinary operations and a dead cat. From its head, Tim could tell it had been a Siamese, yet that was the only clue to its identity. It had been flayed.

Sebastian’s face held a grave look. “De Loudéac is collecting those pieces remaining that he needs to complete his homunculus,” he said, “and I believe he must have nearly all he requires by now.”

By the time Pip and her mother arrived at the doctor’s office, just before noon, the waiting room was quiet. Most of the morning’s patients had been seen, and all the doctors except Dr. Oliver had left to make house or hospital calls.

Pip was the third of three people to be seen by the doctor, who had set aside the last hour before lunch to carry out minor surgical operations. Ahead of her in line was a little girl of about five with a heavily bandaged arm and an elderly woman in a floral print dress.

A short while after the girl had been called into the nurse’s room by the doctor, the elderly lady, who was sitting opposite Pip and her mother, placed the copy of
Country Life
magazine she had been reading back on the magazine table and looked across the waiting room.

“Such a tiresome thing,” she remarked, addressing Pip’s mother. “A mole on my back. Very inconvenient.” She briefly lowered her voice, adding conspiratorially, “It catches on my bra strap. Dr. Oliver says he’ll freeze it off with liquid nitrogen. Science is such a wonderful thing.”

“My daughter is having a wart removed by the same method,” Mrs. Ledger replied. “I’m told it doesn’t even cut the skin. It’s like cauterizing with something very cold instead of very hot.”

“And quite painless,” the woman went on, smiling at Pip. “You’ll not feel a thing. Where is your wart, dear?”

“On my thumb,” Pip said, holding it up.

“Oh, that’s just a little one,” the woman declared. “Doctor’ll have that off in a jiffy. But,” she continued, “when I was a little girl, they didn’t have liquid nitrogen. Do you know how we used to get rid of warts?” She did not wait for Pip’s answer. “We had them charmed away. There was a man in the next village who could wish them away. You went to him and gave him a penny and then, a week later, your wart would be gone. Just like that! My mother used to say it was magic.”

This talk of charms and magic put Pip instantly on the alert. If de Loudéac could be a blackbird, then transforming himself into a pleasant woman in a summer dress would be a piece of cake.

“There’s no accounting for some things,” Mrs. Ledger commented. “Science is all very well, but there’s a lot we don’t know yet.”

“Oh, you can be sure of that!” the woman responded. “Yes, indeed.”

You can say that again, Pip thought.

The door of the waiting room opened, and the nurse poked her head round it to survey the room.

“Mrs. Polson?”

The elderly woman stood up. For not more than a few seconds, Pip could smell her perfume, an overpowering mixture of orange blossom, musk and patchouli oil. But behind it, like a bitter aftertaste, was the vague smell of putrid flesh.

The door closed after her.

“What a pleasant lady,” Pip’s mother remarked.

Pip was terrified. She was now certain the woman had been de Loudéac, shape-shifted into some country lady with a gift for small talk and a more than passing knowledge of witchcraft.

“You look as if you’ve seen a ghost,” her mother said. “White as a cloud.” She patted her daughter’s hand. “Don’t worry. It’ll all be over in two shakes of a puppy-dog’s tail. And it really won’t hurt.”

“No, Mum,” Pip replied solemnly.

She could hardly tell her mother the truth, that the pleasant lady was a fifteenth-century alchemist who practiced the black arts and was in league with Satan and all his evil minions. Picking up a magazine, Pip tried to occupy her mind with the pictures of celebrities and their lives, but it was useless. De Loudéac was there, in the next room, having a mole removed from his back. And, she considered, wasn’t a mole a sign of witchery? Then it dawned on her that so was a wart . . .

The door opened again and the woman came out. “Nothing to worry about, my dear,” she said as she passed Pip’s chair. “All over in two shakes of a puppy-dog’s tail.”

Could she have heard her mother say that? Pip wondered. Had she perhaps, even from the next room, been eavesdropping on their conversation, gleaning any facts she might about Pip and her family? She watched as the woman left the waiting room, spoke briefly to the receptionist at the desk outside, then left the building.

“Philippa Ledger?” the nurse called from the door. “Do you want me to come in with you?” Pip’s mother asked.

“I’ll be all right, Mum.”

Pip stood and went into the nurse’s room. It was as she had expected — a couch with a disposable paper sheet spread over it, several metal chairs, a metal desk with a white melamine surface, a stainless-steel trolley bearing several trays of surgical instruments half covered with a cloth and white cupboards on the wall. Hanging over the couch was a print of a farm scene while over the desk was a calendar advertising a drug company. The room was permeated with the overpowering smell of hospital disinfectant and medicines.

“Sit down here, please, Philippa,” the nurse said, indicating a metal seat with an armrest attached to one side on a swivel. She studied a sheet of paper pinned to Pip’s medical-record folder. “Just a wart to come off. This won’t take long.”

“Isn’t Dr. Oliver going to do it?” Pip asked.

“No, the doctor was called away on an emergency. But that doesn’t matter. This is a simple procedure and I can do it. Only the doctor can remove blemishes from the face. That’s the law. But from a finger ... that can be left to a lowly nurse like me.”

She smiled and turned to the desk, picking up a gadget that looked not unlike Pip’s father’s gas-powered blowlamp.

“This canister,” the nurse explained, “contains liquid nitrogen gas. It is very cold indeed. What I shall do is squirt tiny little bursts of the gas on to your wart. This instantly freezes it, and then I’ll scrape it off with this . . .” she pointed to a steel instrument in a small steel dish “. . . spatula. This process is called cryosurgery.”

Resting Pip’s hand on the armrest, palm up, she swabbed the wart with surgical alcohol and, pulling over another chair, sat next to Pip and took hold of her wrist.

“All you’ll feel is a cold sensation. Nothing to worry about. Ready?”

Pip gritted her teeth and nodded. The nurse put the nozzle to the wart and pressed a trigger. There was a brief fizzle. Pip felt nothing. This was repeated several times, then the nurse put aside the appliance and scraped the wart tissue off into the steel dish. Only at the end, when the base of the wart came out, did Pip wince.

“All done,” said the nurse. “You may have a little blister form, but it’s nothing to worry about.”

“It’s bleeding a bit,” Pip observed.

“It will weep for a little while,” the nurse reassured her, dabbing a gauze swab on the wound and applying a bandage. “If it does, just dab on a bit of antiseptic cream and a new bandage.” She dropped the bloody swab in the dish with the scrapings of wart tissue. “Now, off you go.”

Pip stood up and walked to the door.

“Thank you very much,” she said, turning to the nurse as she reached the door.

Bending over the desk, the nurse was dropping the bloody swab and wart scrapings into an envelope. This she folded and placed in the pocket of her tunic.

“Aren’t you supposed to throw ... .” Pip began. The nurse turned. Her face was contorted, her nose flat and wrinkled like a pig’s, her eyes round and staring like those of a bird. Through her hair, one of her ears was pointed, the tip curling forward. Tufts of coarse, brindled bristles stuck out from it.

Panicking, Pip yanked on the door. It would not open. She wrenched the knob. The latch gave and she almost fell out into the waiting room.

“Was it that bad, darling?” her mother asked sympathetically, a worried look on her face.

Pip, firmly closing the door behind her and gathering her wits about her, replied, “No, Mum. I tripped on the step.”

Seven

The Dead and the Undead

T
wo candles in bronze holders burned upon the table in the center of Sebastian’s subterranean chamber. The flames glinted off the glass retorts and fractionating towers. On the shelves, the dark leather spines of his alchemical books shone like highly polished shoes.

“De Loudéac is ready,” Sebastian announced. “But why did he steal my wart?” Pip asked. “What possible use can he have for a bit of bandage with a drop of blood on it?”

“DNA,” Sebastian answered. “Deoxyribonucleic acid, that which constitutes the genetic matter of all living things, the building blocks of life. If he has but a small amount, he can build upon it. As you would say, clone from it. He first had your blood from the stinging butterfly, then your cells from your hair, but these seem to have been insufficient.”

“You mean,” Pip said, horrified, “that the homunculus is
me
?”

“No, Pip,” Sebastian assured her. “Not you, but it surely contains elements of you, something of your character that de Loudéac required.”

“Such as?” Pip wanted to know and yet, at the same time, she did not.

“Perhaps your strength of character,” Sebastian considered. “Perhaps your innocence, being, as you are in his eyes, a child. Perhaps your intelligence, which will complement another trait he has acquired elsewhere. For you see,” he finished, “he is not making a replica of any one person. He is making a composite. A creature that is a fusion of human and animal characteristics.”

“A lamb’s heart, the Siamese cat’s fur . . .” “Precisely.”

“But that’s unnatural!” Pip retorted. “It’s terrible.” “Indeed,” Sebastian said, “it is against all the laws of Our Lord. Yet it is what he seeks to do, for he wants what he believes will be an invincible creature, one that contains the attributes of its many components.”

“Brave as a lion, fast as a cheetah, quick as a snake,” Tim commented.

Sebastian nodded.

“How can you be sure he is nearly ready?” Pip responded.

“I can be sure,” Sebastian replied, “for tonight is a new moon and it is then that new life may be created.”

He walked across the flagstones and, climbing the library steps, removed a small book from the top shelf. Pip and Tim moved to the table to read it over Sebastian’s shoulder.

“This tome you may not see,” Sebastian said, placing it on the table but not opening it. “Step back, I beg of you.”

Somewhat offended, Pip and Tim retreated a few steps.

“We can be counted on not to tell a secret,” Pip remarked in a pained voice.

“This I know,” Sebastian said, “for I trust you. Yet this book contains matters not that I fear you will recount to others, but of which it is best you remain in ignorance, for your own good.”

He turned the cover over and thumbed through a number of pages until he found what he was looking for. Slowly, his lips moving to the words, he ran his finger down the page. Tim could just see that it contained strange diagrams as well as text. When he was done, Sebastian returned the book to the shelf.

“De Loudéac,” he said, “has to conduct a rite of conception in order to bring his homunculus fully to life. This cannot be accomplished in the town for it would draw much attention. He must find a place where he is safe from discovery, where he may channel and focus the powers of darkness.”