Doctor Illuminatus (5 page)

As he spoke, Pip and Tim just looked at him. Pip wondered how on Earth he knew so much, especially when he had spent all but twelve years or so of the last six centuries asleep and had presumably only recently woken up. It was then she remembered the headmaster mentioning the old man’s nephew. He must have seen Sebastian. As for Tim, he was curious about what
half-life
meant and what actinides were, and resolved to look them up on the Web at the first opportunity.

“It may yet be impossible to prolong life indefinitely, but are there not medicines to conquer illness?” Sebastian continued. “Is not the Human Genome Project and the study of DNA providing cures for genetic diseases? And is it not possible to implant into one man the heart of another, that he might live longer?”

“Yes,” Pip admitted.

Tim was not going to be so easily swayed.

“So! They can transplant hearts and livers and kidneys,” he said, “but making a man . . .”

“Why not?” Sebastian replied. “Are there not fertility methods to create children within the womb? Have not human embryos been formed within test tubes? Do you not know of cloning? Has not a sheep been cloned? If a man can produce a sheep by artificial means, why not a homunculus?”

Sebastian turned to the table and opened one of the leather-bound tomes, fingering carefully through the pages.

“Lamebrain?” Pip whispered to her brother.

Tim looked nonplussed.

“In the sixteenth century,” Sebastian began, “the alchemist, Paracelsus, stated that he produced a golem, one foot high.”

“A golem?” Pip asked.

“It is the ancient Hebrew word for a homunculus,” Sebastian replied, “for such creatures have long been thought to exist, from well before the time of Christ, Our Lord. Paracelsus, however, could not control it and it fled from him.” He held the book out. “You may read of it here.”

Pip and Tim leaned forward. The text on the page used the English alphabet, but they could only recognize a few of the words. The typeface of the printing was ornate, with complicated illuminated capital letters at the start of every paragraph.

“Does it say how he made this creature?” Tim inquired.

“Paracelsus writes that he placed bones, skin and hair from a human in the ground beneath a midden of horse manure. After forty days, an embryo formed . . .”

“And you believe that!” Tim exclaimed.

“Once, yes, I did,” Sebastian admitted, matter-offactly. “Yet now I am wiser.”

He closed the book and put it back on the table. “Alchemy’s bunk!” Tim declared.

Sebastian smiled and asked, “Tim, what time is it?” Tim looked at his watch.

“Twenty-five to one,” he answered.

Sebastian picked up a small glass rod from the table and struck it gently against the wood. It vibrated like a tuning fork. When the tiny hum had almost died away, he got down from his high stool and, after briefly pressing the base of the rod against his own wrist, touched it against Tim’s. A tiny throbbing pulse momentarily tickled his skin.

“Now regard your timepiece, Tim,” Sebastian ordered.

Tim studied his digital watch. There seemed nothing unusual about it. The seconds were still ticking by, yet, as they reached
00
, the minute number did not change.

“You see,” Sebastian exclaimed, “there are things an alchemist may do that even modern science has yet to achieve.”

“Those vibrations have upset the chip in my Seiko,” Tim said, somewhat peeved. He had been given the watch only the previous Christmas, and he tapped the glass in the hope that he might jar it into working properly.

“On the contrary,” Sebastian replied, “the electronic components of your timepiece are unaffected. And your striking it will not affect it, for it has no moving parts. Look instead at your sister.”

Tim turned. Pip was sitting beside him just as she had been, but her face was set in a stare at the far wall. She did not seem to be breathing.

“What’ve you done to her?” Tim said, his voice filled with worry for his sister, his anger rising sharply.

“Do not be concerned,” Sebastian continued. “Pip is well but she is in another time. You see, Tim, I have made time pause for you and me.”

“That’s not possible ... .” Tim began, but Sebastian held his hand up to silence him.

“Consider time,” he said, “to be like a book.” He picked a thin volume up off the table, the ancient leather binding scarred and worn. “Think of this book as being time. It is all happening at once.” He opened a page halfway through. “It is as if we are on this page, yet Pip,” he thumbed over a leaf, “is here. She is waiting for us to catch her up.”

“But for her it’s going on?” Tim asked.

“Yes. Only in relation to you and me, time is frozen for her. On this other page, you and Pip and I are talking. I am telling you that you must go now and, in a few moments, I shall say that I shall see you again on the morrow.”

“So let me get my head around this,” Tim said, still somewhat confused. “According to your theory, at this moment, somewhere else in time — on another page — the Duke of Wellington is winning the battle of Waterloo, Henry Ford is making his first car and the Beatles are topping the charts?”

“Precisely!” Sebastian exclaimed. “Yet this is not theory. Do you know the feeling of
déjà vu
?”

“That’s when you do something, or experience something, for the first time, but feel that you’ve done it before,” Tim said.

“You are correct. It occurs when, for a fleeting moment, it is as if you accidentally have a brief glimpse of being on another page within the book that is time.”

Tim thought for a moment before he asked, “Is doing this time-stopping trick, plus using your father’s method of slowing down your bodily functions, how you hibernate?”

Sebastian did not answer the question directly, but smiled. “It is not a trick, Tim. And I show you this as a lesson you must heed. Do not,” he advised, his voice quiet and earnest, “refuse that which you do not understand. Question it, yes — but never dismiss it until you know the truth of it.”

Picking up the glass rod, Sebastian held it at its ends.

“Shall we rejoin Pip?” he suggested, and, with a sharp crack, snapped the rod in two and dropped the pieces on the table.

Tim’s body shook briefly, as if he were sitting in a car going over a bad pothole. To his surprise, he found himself no longer sitting on the low stool, but on his feet. Pip was standing beside him. Glancing at his watch, he noticed it read
12:38.

“Now, I have tasks to which I must attend,” Sebastian said. “There is much preparation to be done. I shall come again in the forenoon, when I must explain to you why I am awakened.”

Showing Pip and Tim to the door through which they had entered, Sebastian told them, as before, just to keep walking and not to touch the walls. Before they had taken a step, the door closed solidly behind them and they were left in pitch darkness.

“Charming!” Tim exclaimed softly.

No sooner had he spoken than he suddenly felt very afraid. The space between his shoulder blades itched as if someone — or something — were watching him. He involuntarily turned his head, but there was nothing behind him, only blackness. Fumbling in his pocket, he found his Maglite and twisted the end to switch it on. Nothing happened. The batteries were new. He banged it on the palm of his hand. It still refused to come on.

“Pip . . . .” he said, anxiously.

There was no reply.

“Pip!” he hissed loudly.

Still, there was only silence.

Now afraid, Tim started walking briskly, almost breaking into a jog. At any moment, he hoped to catch up with his sister. Gradually, he realized that the floor of the passageway had become steps, each positioned to measure his stride. He slowed and continued to climb, the steps spiraling round. In less than a minute, he found himself in Pip’s room, although he did not remember having to crawl through the opening in the panel to get there.

Pip was woken at nine o’clock by someone shaking her shoulder firmly.

“Come along, slug-a-bed!”

She opened her eyes. Her mother was leaning over her. “This isn’t like you, Pip! You’re usually up with the lark. At least,” she added, “in summer.”

As her mother opened the curtains, letting the bright, clear morning sunlight shine in, Pip sat up, rubbed her eyes and ran her fingers through her sleep-tousled hair.

“Is Tim up?” she asked.

“I’ve just been in to see him. And there’s a boy called Sebastian downstairs come to visit you,” she added. “I didn’t know you’d made any friends around here. That was quick!”

Gathering her wits quickly about her, Pip said, “We only met him yesterday. He’s ... .” she grasped for something to say that was not a lie, without being the entire truth, “. . . the son of someone who used to live here.”

“Fancy that!” her mother responded.

It took Pip less than ninety seconds to dress. Hurrying out of her bedroom, she met Tim at the top of the staircase.

“It’s all true,” he said.

“What is?”

“
Actinides
,
mendelevium
,
half-life
. I logged on last night. A half-life is the length of time it takes half the nuclei of a radioactive element to decay. He knows all about nuclear physics. And the Human Genome Project — that’s a worldwide study of the genetics of the entire human race.”

“I don’t see how ... .” Pip began.

“And that’s not all. Last night, do you remember him tapping a glass rod on the table?”

“Yes.”

“What happened next?”

Pip thought for a moment and said, “He touched your wrist with it, then he snapped it in two.”

“And what happened between those two actions?” “What do you mean?” Pip asked. “Nothing.”

“Yes, it did,” Tim said. “He took me off to another page in time.”

“A what?”

He briefly explained Sebastian’s theory to Pip. “You mean he can travel through time?” she asked at length. “That’s a question scientists have pondered over for centuries.”

“Well,” Tim said, “it seems someone’s found the answer.”

They exchanged glances and descended the stairs. “Your friend tells me he hasn’t had breakfast yet,” their mother announced as Pip and Tim entered the kitchen to find Sebastian standing by the back door, “so you can all have something together.”

She poured out three glasses of orange juice and placed packets of cereal on the table with a jug of milk. They helped themselves to bowls of cornflakes, sitting side by side at the table.

“I understand from Pip that you used to live here, Sebastian?”

“Yes, but when I was younger,” Sebastian admitted between mouthfuls of cereal.

“Was Mr. Rawne your father?” she asked, with apparent innocence.

“He was.”

Pip looked at Tim. This was their mother’s way: pose seemingly innocuous questions until she could entrap you, then move in for the kill.

“I have heard he was in his eighties,” Mrs. Ledger said. “Surely he wasn’t your father!”

“No,” Sebastian answered. “He who lived here was my uncle. My father left the house long before and my uncle lived here thereafter with my aunt. But she died a long time ago.”

“Your uncle?” she replied, clearly doubting the statement. “Surely not your father’s brother?”

Sebastian shook his head and said, “He was actually a distant relative of my father’s. I only called him uncle when I was with him.”

“And tell me, where do your parents live now?” Sebastian, not in the least fazed by this inquisition, replied, “My mother has passed on.”

“Oh! I am so dreadfully sorry,” Mrs. Ledger said, taken aback by Sebastian’s forthrightness.

She was about to go on with her probing when she was interrupted by a buzzing sound coming from the alarm-system panel on the wall by the fridge.

“That’s the carpet fitters,” Mrs. Ledger said. “Now you three eat up and run along. Don’t get underfoot. I’ll be busy all morning.”

“That was close!” Tim whispered, as his mother left the room. “She was out to trip you up.”

“I am aware of this,” Sebastian remarked. “It is a mother’s way with strangers.”

When their breakfast was over, they left the house, Sebastian suggesting that they walk down towards the river. It was a perfect summer’s day, the sky blue and dotted with fair-weather clouds, the shade of the trees deep and close. Where the grass was long, tiny aqua-marine butterflies no bigger than a fingernail flitted between the stems. Here and there, unseen grasshoppers sawed and chirruped.

Reaching the first of the massive oaks, Sebastian paused and said quietly, “This tree was planted by my father. In 1430, the day after my birth.”

“Do you remember your father?” Pip asked. “Indeed,” Sebastian replied, “I was ten years of age when I saw him die.”

“What!” Tim exclaimed. “What do you mean?” “It was here,” Sebastian said, halting halfway between the oak and a towering beech tree. “On this spot. I will show you.”

He bent to the ground where a mole had turned over the earth, and started to dig with his fingers. After excavating a hole only a few centimeters deep, he picked up a handful of soil. It was moist and dark gray, filled with little chips of what looked like black gravel.

“This is charcoal,” he explained. “This field is wet because of the river and so the charcoal has been preserved.” He brushed the earth from his fingers. “It was here, in the month of May in the year of Our Lord 1440, that my father was burned at the stake, accused of witchcraft.”

“That’s awful,” Pip said, feeling the tears well up in her eyes, fighting them back and swallowing the lump forming in her throat.

“My father had powerful enemies,” Sebastian continued calmly. “They did not want him to use his skills on behalf of the king, whom they feared. They came one night and arrested him. There was a trial held, in the chamber that you now call your living room. My father, who was seated before the fireplace, was resigned to his fate. He knew that they would find him guilty.”

“Wasn’t there anyone to speak up for him? A friend or a lawyer or something?” Tim said.

Sebastian smiled faintly. “That was not the way it was,” he replied. “Once my father was arrested, they sought to keep away. They, too, were afraid.”