The Alchemyst (3 page)

CHAPTER FOUR

“I
suppose calling the police is out of the question.” Sophie Newman leaned against a precariously listing bookcase and wrapped her arms around her body to stop herself from shaking. She was surprised that her voice sounded so calm and reasonable. “We’ve got to tell them that Perry’s been kidnapped….”

“Perry’s not in any danger just yet.” Nick Fleming was sitting on one of the lower rungs of a short stepladder. He was holding his head in his hands and breathing deeply, coughing occasionally as he tried to clear his lungs of dust and grit. “But you’re right, we’re not going to the police.” He managed a wan smile. “I’m not sure what we could say to the police that would make any sense to them.”

“I’m not sure that it makes much sense to us either,” Josh said. He was sitting on the only unbroken chair left in the bookshop. Although he’d broken no bones, he was bruised all over and knew he was going to turn several really interesting shades of purple over the next couple of days. The last time he’d felt like this was when he’d been run over by three guys on the football field. Actually, this felt worse. At least then, he knew what was happening.

“I think that perhaps gas escaped into the shop,” Nick suggested cautiously, “and what we’ve all experienced and seen is nothing more than a series of hallucinations.” He stopped, looking at Sophie and Josh in turn.

The twins lifted their heads to look at him, identical expressions of disbelief on their faces, bright blue eyes still wide with shock. “Lame,” Josh said finally.

“Very lame,” Sophie agreed.

Nick shrugged. “Actually, I thought it was a pretty good explanation. It covered the smells, the explosion in the shop and any…any
peculiar
things you
thought
you might have seen,” he finished hurriedly.

Adults, Sophie had decided a long time before, were really bad at making up good excuses. “We didn’t imagine those things,” she said firmly. “We didn’t imagine the Golems.”

“The what?” Josh asked.

“The big guys were Golems; they were made out of mud,” his sister explained. “Perry told me.”

“Ah, she did, did she?” Fleming murmured. He looked around the devastated shop and shook his head. It had taken less than four minutes to completely trash it. “I’m surprised he brought Golems. They are usually so unreliable in warmer countries. But they served his purpose. He got what he came for.”

“The book?” Sophie asked. She had caught a glimpse of it in Josh’s hand before the small man pulled it free. Although she was standing in a shop full of books, and their father owned a huge library of antiquarian books, she had never seen anything like that particular one before. It looked as if it was bound in tarnished metal.

Fleming nodded. “He’s been looking for that for a long time,” he said softly, his pale eyes lost and distant. “A very long time.”

Josh rose slowly to his feet, his back and shoulders aching. He held out two crumpled pages to Nick. “Well, he didn’t get all of it. When he pulled the book out of my hand, I guess I must have been holding on to these.”

Fleming snatched the pages from Josh’s hand with an inarticulate cry. Dropping to the floor, he brushed away shredded books and shattered shelving and laid the two pages on the floor side by side. His long-fingered hands were trembling slightly as he smoothed the pages flat. The twins knelt on the floor on either side of him, staring intently at the pages…and trying to make sense of what they were seeing. “And we’re certainly not imagining
that,
” Sophie whispered, tapping the page with her index finger.

The thick pages were about six inches across by nine inches long and were composed of what looked like pressed bark. Tendrils of fibers and leaves were clearly visible in the surface, and both were covered with jagged, angular writing. The first letter at the top left-hand corner of each page was beautifully illuminated in gold and red, while the rest of the words were written in reddish black ink.

And the words were moving.

Sophie and Josh watched as the letters shifted on the page like tiny beetles, shaping and reshaping themselves, becoming briefly almost legible in recognizable languages like Latin or Old English, but then immediately dissolving and re-forming into ancient-looking symbols not unlike Egyptian hieroglyphs or Celtic Ogham.

Fleming sighed. “No, you’re not imagining that,” he said finally. He reached down the neck of his T-shirt and pulled out a pair of pincenez on a length of black cord. The pincenez were old-fashioned glasses without arms, designed to perch on the bridge of the nose. Using the spectacles as magnifying glasses, Nick moved them across the wriggling, shifting words.
“Ha!”

“Good news?” Josh asked.

“Excellent news. He’s missing the Final Summoning.” He squeezed Josh’s bruised shoulder, making him wince. “If you had wanted to take two pages from the book, rendering it useless, then you could not have chosen better than these.” The broad smile faded from his face. “And when Dee finds out, he’ll be back, and I guarantee you he will not just bring Golems with him next time.”

“Who
was
the gray man?” Sophie asked. “Perry also called him Dee.”

Gathering up the pages, Nick stood. Sophie turned to look at him and realized that he suddenly looked old and tired, incredibly tired. “The gray man was Dr. John Dee, one of the most powerful and dangerous men in the world.”

“I’ve never heard of him,” Josh said.

“To remain unknown in this modern world: that, indeed, is real power. Dee is an alchemist, a magician, a sorcerer and a necromancer, and they are not all the same thing.”

“Magic?” Sophie asked.

“I thought there was no such thing as magic,” Josh said sarcastically, and then immediately felt foolish, after what he’d just seen and experienced.

“Yet you have just fought creatures of magic: the Golems are men created of mud and clay, brought to life by a single word of power. In this century, I’ll wager there are less than half a dozen people who have even seen a Golem, let alone survived an encounter with one.”

“Did Dee bring them to life?” Sophie asked.

“Creating Golems is easy; the spell is as old as humanity. Animating them is a little harder and controling them is practically impossible.” He sighed. “But not for Dr. John Dee.”

“Who is he?” she pressed.

“Dr. John Dee was Court Magician during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I in England.”

Sophie laughed shakily, not entirely sure whether to believe Nick Fleming. “But that was centuries ago; the gray man couldn’t have been older than fifty.”

Nick Fleming crawled around on the floor, pushing through books until he found the one he wanted.
England in the Age of Elizabeth.
He flipped it open: on the page facing an image of Queen Elizabeth I was an old-fashioned etching of a sharp-faced man with a triangular beard. The clothes were different, but there was no doubt that this was the man they had encountered.

Sophie took the book from Nick’s hands. “It says here that Dee was born in 1527,” she said very softly. “That would make him nearly five hundred years old.”

Josh came to stand beside his sister. He stared at the picture, then looked around the room. If he breathed deeply, he could still smell the peculiar odors of…magic. That was what he had been smelling—not mint and rotten eggs, but the scent of magic. “Dee knew you,” he said slowly. “He knew you well,” he added.

Fleming moved about the shop, picking up odd items and dropping them to the floor again. “Oh, he knows me,” he said. “He knows Perry, too. He’s known us for a long time…a very long time.” He looked over at the twins, his almost colorless eyes now dark and troubled. “You’re involved now, more’s the pity, so the time for lies and subterfuge is past. If you are to survive, you will need to know the truth.”

Josh and Sophie looked at one another. They had both picked up the phrase “If you are to survive…”

“My real name is Nicholas Flamel. I was born in France in the year 1330. Perry’s real name is Perenelle: she is ten years older than me. But don’t ever tell her I said that,” he added hastily.

Josh felt his stomach churn and rumble. He was going to say “Impossible!” and laugh and be irritated with Nick for telling them such a stupid story. But he was bruised and aching from being flung across the room by…by what? He remembered the Golem that had reached for Perry—
Perenelle
—and how it had dissolved into powder at her touch.

“What…what are you?” Sophie asked the question that was forming on her twin’s lips. “What
are
you and Perenelle?”

Nick smiled, but his face was cold and humorless, and for an instant, he almost resembled Dee. “We are legend,” he said simply. “Once—a long time ago—we were simple people, but then I bought a book, the Book of Abraham the Mage, usually called the Codex. From that moment on, things changed. Perenelle changed. I changed. I became the Alchemyst.

“I became the greatest alchemyst of all time, sought after by kings and princes, by emperors and even the Pope himself. I discovered the secret of the philosopher’s stone hidden deep in that book of ancient magic: I learned how to turn ordinary metal into gold, how to change common stones into precious jewels. But more than this, much more, I found the recipe for a formulation of herbs and spells that keeps disease and death at bay. Perenelle and I became virtually immortal.” He held up the torn pages in his hand. “This is all that remains of the Codex. Dee and his kind have been seeking the Book of the Mage for centuries. Now they have it. And Perenelle, too,” he added bitterly.

“But you said the Book is useless without these pages,” Josh reminded him quickly.

“That is true. There is enough in the Book to keep Dee busy for centuries, but these pages are vital,” Nick agreed. “Dee will be coming back for them.”

“There’s something else, though, isn’t there?” Sophie asked quickly. “Something more.” She knew he was holding something back; adults always did. Their parents had taken months to tell Josh and her that they would be spending the summer in San Francisco.

Nick glanced at her sharply, and once again she was reminded of the look Dee had given her earlier: there was something cold and inhuman in it. “Yes…there is something more,” he said hesitantly. “Without the Book, Perenelle and I will age. The formulation for immortality must be brewed afresh every month. Within the full cycle of the moon, we will wither and die. And if we die, then the evil we have so long fought against will triumph. The Elder Race will claim this earth again.”

“The Elder Race?” Josh asked, his voice rising and cracking. He swallowed hard, conscious now that his heart was thumping in his chest. What had started out as just another ordinary Thursday afternoon had turned into something strange and terrible. He played a lot of computer games, read some fantasy novels, and in those,
elder
always meant ancient and dangerous. “Elder, as in old?”

“Very old,” Flamel agreed.

“You mean there are more like Dee, like you?” Josh said, then winced as Sophie kicked his shins.

Flamel turned to look at Josh, his colorless eyes now clouded with anger. “There are others like Dee, yes, and others like me, too, but Dee and I are not alike. We were never alike,” Flamel added bitterly. “We chose to follow different paths, and his has led him down some very dark roads. He too is immortal, though even I am not sure how he retains his youth. But we are both human.” He turned to the cash register, which was lying broken open on the floor, and started scooping out the money as he spoke. When he turned to look at the twins, they were startled by the grim expression on his face. “Those whom Dee serves are not and never were from the race of man.” Shoving the money into his pockets, he grabbed a battered leather jacket off the floor. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

“Where will you go? What will you do?” Sophie asked.

“What about us?” Josh finished the thought for her, as she often did for him.

“First I have to get you to a place of safety before Dee realizes that the pages are missing. Then I’ll go in search of Perenelle.”

The twins looked at each other. “Why do you have to get us to a safe place?” Sophie asked.

“We don’t know anything,” Josh said.

“Once Dee discovers that the Book is incomplete, he will return for the missing pages. And I guarantee you, he will leave no witnesses on this earth.”

Josh started to laugh, but the sound died in his throat when he realized that his sister was not even smiling. “You’re…” He licked suddenly dry lips. “You’re saying that he would kill us?”

Nicholas Flamel tilted his head to one side, considering. “No,” he said finally, “not kill you.”

Josh heaved a sigh of relief.

“Believe me,” Flamel continued. “Dee can do much worse to you. Much worse.”

CHAPTER FIVE

T
he twins stood on the sidewalk outside the bookshop, glass from the broken windows crunching under their feet, watching as Nick produced a key. “But we can’t just leave,” Sophie said firmly.

Josh nodded. “We’re not going anywhere.”

Nick Fleming—or Flamel, as they were beginning to think of him—turned the key in the lock of the bookshop and rattled the door. Within the shop, they could hear books sliding onto the floor. “I really loved this shop,” Flamel muttered. “It reminded me of my very first job.” He glanced at Sophie and Josh. “You have no choice. If you want to survive the rest of the day, you have to leave now.” Then he turned away, pulling on his battered leather jacket as he hurried across the road to The Coffee Cup. The twins looked at each other, then hurried after him.

“You’ve got keys to lock up?”

Sophie nodded. She produced the two keys on their Golden Gate Bridge key ring. “Look, if Bernice comes back and finds the shop closed, she’ll probably call the police or something….”

“Good point,” Flamel said. “Leave a note,” he told Sophie, “something short—you had to leave suddenly, some sort of emergency, that sort of thing. Say that I accompanied you. Scribble it; make it look as if you left in a hurry. Are your parents still on that dig in Utah?” The twins’ parents were archaeologists, currently on loan to the University of San Francisco.

Sophie nodded. “For another six weeks at least.”

“We’re still staying with Aunt Agnes in Pacific Heights,” Josh added. “Aunt Agony.”

“We can’t just disappear. She’ll be expecting us home for dinner,” Sophie said. “If we’re even five minutes late, she gets in a tizzy. Last week, when the trolley car broke down and we were an hour late, she’d already phoned our parents by the time we got there.” Aunt Agnes was eighty-four, and although she drove the twins to distraction with her constant fussing, they were very fond of her.

“Then you’ll need to give her an excuse too,” Flamel said bluntly, sweeping into the coffee shop with Sophie close behind him.

Josh hesitated before stepping into the cool, sweet-smelling gloom of The Coffee Cup. He stood on the sidewalk, his backpack slung over his shoulder, looking up and down. If you ignored the sparkling glass littering the sidewalk in front of the bookshop, everything looked perfectly normal, an ordinary weekday afternoon. The street was still and silent, the air was heavy with just a hint of the ocean. Across the bay, beyond Fisherman’s Wharf, a ship’s horn sounded, the deep noise lost and lonely in the distance. Everything looked more or less as it had half an hour earlier.

And yet…

And yet it was not the same. It could never be the same again. In the last thirty minutes, Josh’s carefully ordered world had shifted and altered irrevocably. He was a normal high school sophomore, not too brilliant, but not stupid either. He played football, sang—badly—in his friend’s band, had a few girls he was interested in, but no real girlfriend yet. He played the occasional computer game, preferred first person shooters like Quake and Doom and Unreal Tournament, couldn’t handle the driving games and got lost in Myst. He loved
The Simpsons
and could quote chunks of episodes by heart, really liked
Shrek,
though he’d never admit it, thought the new Batman was all right and that X-Men was excellent. He even liked the new Superman, despite what other people said. Josh was ordinary.

But ordinary teens did not find themselves in the middle of a battle between two incredibly ancient magicians.

There was no magic in the world. Magic was movie special effects. Magic was stage shows with rabbits and doves and sometimes tigers, and David Copperfield sawing people in half and levitating over the audience. There was no such thing as real magic.

But how then could he explain what had just happened in the bookshop? He had watched shelves turn to rotten wood, seen books dissolve into pulp, smelled the stink of rotten eggs from Dee’s spells and the cleaner scent of mint when Fleming—
Flamel
—worked his magic.

Josh Newman shivered in the bright afternoon sunshine and ducked into The Coffee Cup, pulling open his backpack and reaching in for his battered laptop. He needed to use the café’s wireless Internet connection; he had names he wanted to look up: Doctor John Dee, Perenelle and especially Nicholas Flamel.

Sophie scribbled a quick note on the back of a napkin, then chewed the end of the pencil as she read it.

Mrs. Fleming unwell. Gas leak in the shop. Gone to hospital. Mr. Fleming with us. Everything else OK. Will phone later.

When Bernice came back and found the shop closed just before the late-afternoon rush, she was not going to be happy. Sophie guessed that she might even lose her job. Sighing, she signed the note with a flourish that tore through the paper, and stuck it to the cash register.

Nicholas Flamel peered over her shoulder and read it. “That’s good, very good, and it explains why the bookshop is closed too.” Flamel glanced over his shoulder to where Josh was tapping furiously at his keyboard. “Let’s go!”

“Just checking my mail,” Josh muttered, powering off the machine and closing it.

“At a time like this?” Sophie asked incredulously.

“Life goes on. E-mail stops for no man.” He attempted a smile, and failed.

Sophie grabbed her bag and vintage denim jacket, taking a last look around the coffee shop. She had the sudden thought that she would not be seeing it again for a long time, but that was ridiculous, of course. She turned out the lights, ushered her brother and Nick Fleming—Flamel—through the door ahead of her and hit the alarm. Then she pulled the door shut, turned the key in the lock and dropped the key chain through the letter box.

“Now what?” she asked.

“Now we get some help and we hide until I figure out what to do with you both.” Flamel smiled. “We’re good at hiding; Perry and I have been doing it for more than half a millennium.”

“What about Perry?” Sophie asked. “Will Dee…harm her?” She’d come to know and like the tall, elegant woman over the past few weeks as she came into the coffee shop. She didn’t want anything to happen to her.

Flamel shook his head. “He can’t. She’s too powerful. I never studied the sorcerous arts, but Perry did. Right now all Dee can do is contain her, prevent her from using her powers. But in the next few days she
will
start to age and weaken. Possibly in a week, certainly within two weeks, he would be able to use his powers against her. Still, he’ll be cautious. He will keep her trapped behind Wards and Sigils….” Flamel saw the look of confusion on Sophie’s face. “Magical barriers,” he explained. “He’ll only attack when he is sure of victory. But first he will try to discover the extent of her arcane knowledge. Dee’s search for knowledge was always his greatest strength…and his weakness.” He absently patted his pockets, looking for something. “My Perry can take care of herself. Remind me to tell you the story sometime of how she faced down a pair of Greek Lamiae.”

Sophie nodded, though she had no idea what Greek Lamiae were.

As Flamel strode down the street, he found what he was looking for: a pair of small round sunglasses. He put them on, stuck his hands in the pockets of his leather jacket and began to whistle tunelessly, as if he hadn’t a care in the world. He glanced back over his shoulder. “Well, come on.”

The twins looked at each other blankly, then hurried after him.

“I checked him out online,” Josh muttered, looking quickly at his sister.

“So that’s what you were doing. I didn’t think e-mail could be that important.”

“Everything he says checks out: he’s there on Wikipedia and there are nearly two hundred thousand results for him on Google. There are over ten million results for John Dee. Even Perenelle is there, and it mentions the book and everything. It even says that when he died, his grave was dug up by people searching for treasure and they found it empty—no body and no treasure. Apparently, his house is still standing in Paris.”

“He sure doesn’t look like an immortal magician,” Sophie murmured.

“I’m not sure I know what a magician looks like,” Josh said quietly. “The only magicians I know are Penn and Teller.”

“I’m not a magician,” Flamel said, without looking at them. “I’m an alchemyst, a man of science, though perhaps not the science you would be familiar with.”

Sophie hurried to catch up. She reached out to touch his arm and slow him down, but a spark—like static electricity—snapped into her fingertips. “Aaah!” She jerked her hand back, fingertips tingling. Now what?

“I’m sorry,” Flamel explained. “That’s an aftereffect of the…well, what you would call magic. My aura—the electrical field that surrounds my body—is still charged. It’s just reacting when it hits your aura.” He smiled, showing perfectly regular teeth. “It also means you must have a powerful aura.”

“What’s an aura?”

Flamel strode on a couple of steps down the sidewalk without answering, then turned to point to a window. The word
TATTOO
was picked out in fluorescent lighting. “See there…see how there is a glow around the words?”

“I see it.” Sophie nodded, squinting slightly. Each letter was outlined in buzzing yellow light.

“Every human has a similar glow around their body. In the distant past, people could see it clearly and they named it the
aura.
It comes from the Greek word for breath. As humans evolved, most lost the ability to see the aura. Some still can, of course.”

Josh snorted derisively.

Flamel glanced over his shoulder. “It’s true. The aura has even been photographed by a Russian couple called the Kirlians. The electrical field surrounds every living organism.”

“What does it look like?” Sophie asked.

Flamel tapped his finger on the shop window. “Just like that: a glow around the body. Everyone’s aura is unique—different colors, different strengths. Some glow solidly, others pulse. Some appear around the edge of the body, other auras cloak the body like an envelope. You can tell a lot from a person’s aura: whether they are ill or unhappy, angry or frightened, for example.”

“And you can see these auras?” Sophie said.

Flamel shook his head, surprising them. “No, I cannot. Perry can, sometimes. I cannot. But I know how to channel and direct the energy. That’s what you were seeing earlier today: pure auric energy.”

“I think I’d like to learn how to do that,” Sophie said.

Flamel glanced at her quickly. “Be careful what you wish for. Every use of power has a cost.” He held out his hand. Sophie and Josh crowded around on the quiet side street. Flamel’s hand was visibly trembling. And when Sophie looked into his face, she noticed that his eyes were bloodshot. “When you use auric energy, you burn as many calories as if you had run a marathon. Think of it like draining a battery. I doubt I could have lasted very much longer against Dee back there.”

“Is Dee more powerful that you?”

Flamel smiled grimly. “Infinitely.” Shoving his hands back into the pockets of his leather jacket, he continued down the street, Sophie and Josh now walking on either side of him. In the distance, the Golden Gate Bridge began to loom over the rooftops. “Dee has spent the past five centuries developing his powers; I’ve spent that same time hiding mine, concentrating only on those few little things I needed to do to keep Perenelle and myself alive. Dee was always powerful, and I dread to think what he is capable of now.” At the bottom of the hill he paused, looking left and right, then abruptly turned to the left and headed into California Street. “There’ll be time for questions later. Right now, we have to hurry.”

“Have you known Dee long?” Josh persisted, determined to get some answers.

Nicholas Flamel smiled grimly. “John Dee was a mature man when I accepted him as my apprentice. I still took apprentices in those days, and so many of them went on to make me proud. I had visions of creating the next generation of alchemists, scientists, astronomers, astrologers and mathematicians: these would be the men and women who would create a new world. Dee was probably the finest student I ever had. So I suppose you could say that I’ve known him for nearly five hundred years—though our encounters have been somewhat sporadic over the past few decades.”

“What turned him into your enemy?” Sophie asked.

“Greed, jealousy…and the Codex, the Book of Abraham the Mage,” Flamel answered. “He’s coveted that for a long time, and now he has it.”

“Not all of it,” Josh reminded him.

“No, not all of it.” Flamel smiled. He walked on, with the twins still on either side of him. “When Dee was my apprentice in Paris, he found out about the Codex. One day I caught him attempting to steal it, and I knew then that he had allied himself with the Dark Elders. I refused to share its secrets with him and we had a bitter argument. That night he sent the first assassins after Perry and me. They were human and we dealt with them easily. The next night, the assassins were decidedly less than human. So Perry and I took the Book, gathered up our few belongings and fled Paris. He’s been chasing us ever since.”

They stopped at a cross light. A trio of British tourists was waiting for the light to change and Flamel fell silent, a quick glance at Sophie and Josh warning them to say nothing. The light changed and they crossed, the tourists heading to the right, Nicholas Flamel and the twins moving to the left.

“Where did you go when you left Paris?” Josh asked.

“London,” Flamel said shortly. “Dee nearly caught us there in 1666,” he continued. “He loosed a Fire Elemental after us, a savage, mindless creature that almost devoured the city. History calls it the Great Fire.”

Sophie looked over at Josh. They had both heard of the Great Fire of London; they had learned about it in world history. She was surprised by how calm she felt: here she was, listening to a man who claimed to be more than five hundred years old, recounting historical events as if he had been there when they happened. And she believed him!

“Dee came dangerously close to capturing us in Paris in 1763,” Flamel continued, “and again in 1835, when we were in Rome working as booksellers, as it happens. That was always my favorite occupation,” he added. He fell silent as they approached a group of Japanese tourists listening intently to their guide, who was standing beneath a bright yellow umbrella. When they were out of earshot, he continued, the events of more than a century and a half earlier obviously still fresh and bitter in his memory.