The Alchemyst (28 page)

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

D
eep beneath Alcatraz, Perenelle Flamel lay on a narrow cot, her face turned toward the back wall of her cell. Behind her, in the corridor outside, she could hear the sphinx click-clacking up and down the cold stone floors, and the air was heavy with the musky odors of snake and lion. Perenelle shivered. The cell was freezing, and green-tinged water was dripping down the wall inches from her face.

Where was Nicholas?

What was happening?

Perenelle was afraid, but not for herself. The fact that she was alive meant that Dee needed her for something, and that sooner or later she would come face to face with him. And if Dee had a failing, it was arrogance. He would underestimate her…and then she would strike! There was a particularly nasty little spell she had learned in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains in Transylvania that she was saving just for him.

Where was Nicholas?

She was afraid for Nicholas and the children. It was difficult for her to judge just how much time has passed, but by examining the wrinkles forming on the backs of her hands, she guessed she’d aged at least two years, so two days had passed. Without the immortality elixir, she and Nicholas would age at the rate of a year a day. They had less than a month left before they succumbed to old—
very
old—age.

And with no one to stand against them, Dee and the others like him would loose the Dark Elders into the world again. It would be chaos; civilization would fall.

Where was Nicholas?

Perenelle blinked away tears. She wasn’t going to give the sphinx the satisfaction of seeing her weep. The Elders had nothing but contempt for human emotion; they considered it their biggest weakness. Perenelle knew it was humankind’s great strength.

She blinked again, and it took her a moment to realize what she was seeing.

The foul dripping water running down the walls had briefly curled and formed into a pattern. She focused, trying to make sense of what she was seeing.

The liquid twisted and coiled into a face: Jefferson Miller, the ghost of the security guard. The dribbling water bent into letters on the moss-streaked walls.

Flamel. Children.

The words lasted less than a heartbeat before they flowed away.

Safe.

Now Perenelle had to blink hard to clear her eyes. Flamel and the children were safe!

Ojai. Leygate. Paris.

“Thank you,” Perenelle mouthed silently as Jefferson Miller’s face dissolved and ran liquid down the wall. She had so many questions—but at least now she had some answers: Nicholas and the children were safe. They had obviously reached Ojai and met the Witch of Endor. She must have opened the leygate to take them to Paris, and that suggested that the Witch had helped them and had most likely instructed Sophie in the Magic of Air.

Perenelle knew that the Witch would not have been able to Awaken Josh’s powers—but in Paris and across Europe there were Elders and immortal humans who would be able to help, who could Awaken Josh and train both twins in the five elemental magics.

She rolled over on her back and looked at the sphinx, which was now crouched outside her cell, human head resting on enormous lion’s paws, wings folded across its back. The creature smiled lazily, long black forked tongue flickering.

“It is ending, Immortal,” the sphinx whispered.

Perenelle’s smile was terrifying. “On the contrary,” she replied. “It is now only just beginning.”

End of Book One

Nicholas and Perenelle Flamel were real people. So was Dr. John Dee. Indeed, all the characters in
The Alchemyst,
with the exception of the twins, are based on real historical characters or mythological beings.

When I originally conceived the idea for
The Alchemyst,
I thought the hero would be Dr. John Dee.

John Dee has always fascinated me. In the Elizabethan Age, the age of the extraordinary, he was exceptional. He was one of the most brilliant men of his time, and all the details about his life in
The Alchemyst
are true: he was an alchemist, a mathematician, a geographer, an astronomer and an astrologer. He did choose the date for Queen Elizabeth I’s coronation, and when he was part of her network of spies, he signed his coded messages “007.” The two 0’s represented the eyes of the Queen, and the symbol that looked like a 7 was Dee’s personal mark. There is evidence to suggest that when Shakespeare created the character of Prospero for
The Tempest,
he modeled him on Dee.

The series of books based on an alchemist had been growing in my head and in piles of notebooks for some years, and it seemed perfectly natural that it should be Dee’s series. As I wrote other books, I kept coming back to the idea, adding more material, weaving together all the world mythologies and creating the huge and intricate background for the stories. I continued to research the settings, visiting, revisiting and photographing every location I intended to use in the series.

Every story starts with an idea, but it is the characters that move that idea forward. The characters of the twins came to me first. My story was always about a brother and sister, and in mythological terms, twins are very special. Just about every race and mythology has a twin story. As my story progressed, the secondary characters, such as Scathach and the Morrigan, and then later, Hekate and the Witch of Endor, appeared. But somehow I still hadn’t quite gotten the hero, the mentor, the teacher for the twins. Dr. John Dee, despite being a wonderful character, was simply not the
right
character.

Then, one day in the late fall of 2000, I was in Paris on business. It is difficult to get lost in Paris, so long as you know where the river Seine is—you can usually see one or more of the great landmarks, such as the Eiffel Tower, Sacré-Coeur or Notre Dame—but somehow I’d managed to do it. I had left Notre Dame earlier, crossed the Seine on the Pont d’Arcole, heading toward the Centre Pompidou, and somewhere between the Boulevard de Sebastopol and the Rue Beaubourg, I got lost. Not entirely lost; I knew vaguely where I was, but night was beginning to fall. I turned off the Rue Beaubourg into the narrow Rue du Montmorency and found myself looking up at a sign that said
AUBERGE NICOLAS FLAMEL
: the Nicholas Flamel Hostel. And in front of the building was a sign that said the house, where Flamel and his wife had once lived, dated from 1407, which meant that this had to be one of the oldest houses in Paris.

I went inside and found a charming restaurant, where I had a meal that night. It was a strange experience, eating in the same room where the legendary Nicholas Flamel would have lived and worked. The exposed beams in the ceiling looked original, which meant they would have been the beams Nicholas Flamel himself would have seen. In the cellar below my feet, Nicholas and Perenelle would have stored their food and wine, and their bedchamber would have been in the small room directly over my head.

I knew quite a bit about the famous Nicholas Flamel. Dee, who had one of the largest libraries in England, had Flamel’s books and would have studied his works.

Nicholas Flamel was one of the most famous alchemists of his day. Alchemy is a peculiar combination of chemistry, botany, medicine, astronomy and astrology. It has a long and distinguished history and was studied in ancient Greece and China, and there is an argument that it forms the basis for modern chemistry. As with Dee, all of the details in
The Alchemyst
about Nicholas Flamel are true. We know quite a bit about him because not only do his own writings exist, but also many people wrote about him during his own lifetime.

He was born in 1330 and scraped by on a living as a bookseller and a scrivener, writing letters and copying books for clients. One day he bought a very special book: the Book of Abraham. It, too, really existed, and Nicholas Flamel left us with a very detailed description of the copper-bound book, which was written on what looked like bark.

Accompanied by Perenelle, he spent more than twenty years traveling all over Europe, trying to translate the strange language the book was written in.

No one knows what happened to Nicholas Flamel on that journey. What is authenticated is that when he returned to Paris in the late fourteenth century, he was extraordinarily wealthy. The rumor quickly went around that he had discovered the two great secrets of alchemy in the Book of Abraham: how to create a philosopher’s stone, which changed ordinary metal into gold, and how to achieve immortality. Neither Nicholas nor Perenelle would ever confirm the rumors, and they never explained how they had become so rich.

Although Nicholas and Perenelle continued to live quiet, unassuming lives, they gave a lot of their money to charity, and founded hospitals, churches and orphanages.

The records show that Perenelle died first; not long after, in 1418, the death of Nicholas Flamel was recorded. His house was sold and the buyers tore the place apart looking for some of the Flamels’ great wealth. Nothing was ever found.

Later, in the dead of night, the tomb of Nicholas and Perenelle Flamel was broken into…and that was when it was discovered that the tomb was empty. Had they been buried in secret graves, or had they never died in the first place? Paris buzzed with rumors, and the legend of the immortal Flamels began almost immediately.

In the years to follow, there were sightings of the Flamels across Europe.

When I came out of the Auberge Nicolas Flamel that evening, I looked back at the ancient house. Six hundred years ago, one of the most famous alchemists in the world lived and worked there—a man dedicated to science, who had made and given away a vast fortune and whose house was preserved by the grateful people of Paris, who even have streets named after him and his wife (the Rue Nicolas Flamel and the Rue Perenelle in the 4th Arrondissement).

An immortal.

And in that moment, I knew that the twins’ mentor was not Dee: Sophie and Josh would be taught by Nicholas and Perenelle. As I stood outside Nicholas and Perenelle’s home on that wet fall evening, all the pieces of the book came together, and the Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel took shape.

Front entrance to the Auberge Nicolas Flamel (the Nicholas Flamel Hostel) on Rue du Montmorency, Paris.

A Special Preview of

THE

MAGICIAN

Book two of

Excerpt copyright © 2007 by Michael Scott.

Published by Delacorte Press.

I am dying.

Along with my wife Perenelle, I age a year for every day that passes, and thus, by my reckoning, we both have less than a month to live.

But much can be achieved in a month.

Dee and his dark masters have Perenelle prisoner, they have finally secured the Codex, the Book of Abraham the Mage, and they must also know that Perenelle and I cannot survive for much longer.

But they cannot be resting easy.

They must know now that Sophie and Josh are the twins mentioned in the ancient book. They are the twins of prophecy and legend, with auras of silver and gold, brother and sister with the power to either save the world…or destroy it. The girl’s powers have been Awakened, though, sadly, the boy’s have not.

Now we are in Paris, the city of my birth, the city where I first discovered the Codex and began the long quest to translate it. That journey led me to the discovery of the Elder Race, revealed the mystery of the philosopher’s stone and finally the ultimate secret of immortality.

I love this city. It holds many secrets and is home to more than one human immortal and ancient Elder. Here, I will find a way to Awaken Josh’s powers and continue Sophie’s education.

I must.

For their sakes—and for the continuance of the human race.

From the Day Booke of Nicholas Flamel, Alchemyst
Writ this day, Friday, 1st June, in
Paris, the city of my youth