Alchemist (2 page)

He put his hat on, shouldered his small bag and began walking. He carried no map but he knew where he was going, did not even need the track that stretched out beyond his shadow in front of him. He knew, because something was drawing him forward like a magnet. Drawing him to his destiny. Towards the closest-kept secret in the world. His time had come and he was prepared.

The wind brushed against his face, like a sign.

He walked due west. Thoughts came to him, tumbled into his mind, jostled for space. The hailing frequency had been opened and he was here to listen, to be instructed; to receive. To receive the gift that was above all others. Moses had led the children of Israel through this desert. Now he too was being led through this same desert, walking in time's footsteps, and soon he would be standing on the shoulders of a giant. The
Sermon on the Mount had been delivered on one of the slopes that lay ahead. The history of Christianity belonged in the granules of sand that coated the terrain.

Silicon came from sand. From two bits of dust came the Big Bang – all Creation. From a few grains of sand came the silicon chip. Chemistry. Chemistry was everything. Now you could have a computer that was smaller than a grain of sand.
And I will show you something different from either
/
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
/
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
/
I will show you fear in a handful of dust
.

He walked for two hours at an unfaltering pace, passing several flocks of sheep and goats tended by Bedouins in tatty black and white robes, preparing himself all the time, the way he had been taught. Opening up the channels. Sweat sloughed off him, drenching his white silk shirt, gluing it to his skin, spreading dark stains under the arms of his linen jacket. He always wore a suit and tie and it had not occurred to him to wear anything less now. A camel train moved across the horizon like a mirage, but his inner concentration was such that he barely noticed it.

The Alpha and the Omega
, he thought. The words repeated in his head like a mantra as he walked.
The Alpha and the Omega
. He smiled; it gave him strength, warded off the fear that he still felt with every step that it could go wrong, so terribly wrong. It had been known to go wrong before. He paused to drink from the water bottle he carried in his bag, then walked on.

The mountains were closer now. He could see the sheer faces of sandstone rising into the sky like shadows, and could feel in his bones the inky darkness of the cave that was steadily reeling him in. But he had no fear now, only a growing elation. Above him, a lone hawk cruised high overhead, and somewhere else in the sky an unseen bird cried a single low call that reminded him of a gull.

The sun was beginning to sink down towards the peaks, lengthening his shadow ahead of him, and he felt tired for the first time as he started the climb. There was no track now, no
signposts or markers, no hint that man had ever been here before, just the ever-steepening wall of rock that was both rising above him and dropping beneath him into the valley.

Then finally as he continued his long traverse, he saw a figure above him, sitting motionless like a statue. Standing silently beside it, he could make out the tethered goat. They were here; he had come to the right place; he chided himself for having had momentary doubts, then his pace quickened with a new energy.

He walked along a narrow ledge, the mountain dropping sheer away to his left; the wind came out of the darkness of the cave to greet him: dank, cold air. The seated man did not move as he approached, did not turn his head but just stared ahead into the narrow entrance of the cave that stretched back miles into pitch blackness, as motionless as the wooden stake beside him to which his goat was tethered.

Dressed in a dirty white jellaba, the goatherd was skeletally thin, with the Semitic features of the region that could have passed him for a Jew or a Palestinian. His small dark eyes were glazed and devoid of all expression.

The Englishman eyed the goatherd carefully. He was about twenty; personally he would have chosen someone a bit younger and stronger, but he would do, he supposed; anyone in their prime would do. He walked on past him into the darkness of the cave itself, without acknowledging him.

In the dim edges of light he could see the pentacle carved as finely as a tomb into the floor, and the ornate stone chair that stood like a throne in its midst. He put his bag on the floor then sat in the chair as he had been told, folded his hands in his lap, closed his eyes and meditated for an hour.

As he opened his eyes again, the first rays of the setting sun came through the opening in the five-sided lodestone that hung beneath the roof of the cave. Minutes later the whole orb of the sun was visible, dazzling, but the Englishman stared at it, imposing his will against it, and remained silent.

The sun slid directly down behind the back of the goatherd, until it seemed that he had absorbed all its light and the Englishman could see nothing but his shimmering silhouette against the sky. Then darkness came rapidly outside.

The Englishman waited patiently as if all time had stopped for him, waited until the signal came into his mind, then he began to speak the words of the incantation he had been learning, rehearsing and reciting every day for ten years.

They were behind him, somewhere, in the darkness. He had not seen them and they made no sound but he knew they were there, all of them standing in their ordained positions, except for the old man who would be lying on the stretcher on which they had carried him. After two hours he finished the incantation. The last echoes of his words died.

Now he had to wait again.

All time was really suspended now. All time was his. The Englishman could see and hear nothing; he stared ahead blindly, dimly aware of the chill air numbing his body. He felt more calm than he had ever been before in his whole life. More ready. It was coming and it would be here soon.

The first signal came from the goat. A tentative bleat, then another, more insistent. He heard a hoof shuffle on the stone floor, then a stamp, the rope of the tether creaking against the stake. Then more bleats, rising fear.

The first icy tongues of wind licked the Englishman's face hungrily, teased his hair, ruffled his clothes. They came in fast, unannounced, strengthening in intensity every second, getting colder, rougher, pushing him around on his chair, buffeting him.

He heard a rumble like an approaching tube train, followed by a faint tremor. Now! It was coming now. Travelling across all time to meet him. It was an appointment he had always known, from the day he was born, that he would one day keep. Here it was!

‘Ayaaaaaayaaaaaaa!' The goatherd's cry of terror rang out and was swept away in the vortex of wind that exploded like a bomb inside the cave.

The Englishman was catapulted from his chair, hurtled across the floor and slammed into a wall. Wind screamed around him, pressed on his ears as if it were going to shatter his drums, implode his head; for a moment his faith left him
and he tried to blot out the pain, bit his tongue to prevent himself from screaming out loud.

The wind caterwauled around him; it carried voices, foreign tongues, strange sounds, chants. It lifted the Englishman up, sent him tumbling across the floor, lifted him again, dropped him, gashing his head on the stone chair. He groped the floor wildly with his hands.

Stay inside the pentacle
.

The instruction, had to obey the instruction, the first rule. He felt for the lines carved into the floor; the floor heaved, shook, tipped him sideways.

Then there was complete silence.

He lay still. The wind had gone completely. There was nothing now, nothing at all except for bitumen blackness and the silence.

Somewhere a light flared. He smelled the smoky warmth of burning paraffin. Flickering lights on the walls, growing in number, in intensity. He looked behind him: a row of lit torches stretched the full two hundred yards' width of the cave. He could see the silhouettes behind them but not the faces. There was no need to see the faces; many he already knew; the others, in time, he would meet.

He turned to look at the goatherd and the goat. He saw the frayed fronds of the snapped tether first; then one of the goat's hooves and a section of the leg. Beside it lay two human arms torn off at the elbow, the fingers interlinked as if in a final gesture of prayer; they were partly covered in a ragged strip of bloodstained cloth. A coil of the goat's intestines glistened in a slimy heap on the floor near them.

He saw a human foot, then the goatherd's head and the top part of his torso crudely severed at the breastbone; close beside lay the head of the animal severed at the neck and tilted at an angle, with one ear raised as if cocked to listen. Blood, strips of flesh, fragments of organs lay scattered across the floor and adhered to the walls as if hurled by an explosion.

The silence seemed as if it would last for ever.

It was broken finally by the old man's voice; the old man they had carried here on the stretcher. He spoke in sure, quiet tones filled with the authority he had held for so many years:

Nema. Olam a son arebil des
Menoitatnet ni sacudni son en te.
Sirtson subirotibed
Summittimid son te tucis
Artson atibed sibon ettimid te
Eidoh sibon ad
Munaiditouq murtson menap
Arret ni te oleac ni
Tucis aut satnulov taif
Muut munger tainevda
Muut nemon rutecifitcnas
Sileac ni se iuq
Retson retap.
Hail the new emperor of the Grand Grimoire!

The Englishman bided his time before replying. He stood up, restored himself in his chair, and sat facing away from the torch lights and out into the night. He breathed in slowly and deeply, filling his lungs so that his voice would carry, then braced himself: ‘Hail Satan,' he said.

The echo came back in unison: ‘Hail Satan!'

Reading
,
England
.
November
,
1993

Only one of them would survive. They raced through the darkness, guided solely by instincts handed down through three billion years. And each of them had less intelligence than a clockwork toy.

Just one survivor out of sixty-five million. Strength would have something to do with it but mostly it would be luck. The right place at the right time. Like life itself.

Sixty-five million wiggling, tadpole-like creatures inside a soup of chemicals, ejaculated into the woman, freed and doomed simultaneously. Ripples of contraction joined with their own efforts and propelled them forward in tiny tramlines through the mucus, at a rate of one inch every eight minutes, up towards the uterus. Each elbowed the next, as they fought their way through the prickly follicles of hair that blocked their path and which entwined them like tentacles, some getting no further. The rest moved on, propelled by a primal urgency they were not equipped to understand, and with no concept of what failure meant.

Unaware of the turmoil deep inside her own body, Sarah Johnson stared up at her husband's face in the glow of the bedside light and smiled. ‘Don't move,' she said. ‘Stay there, it feels so good.' She reached up and kissed him.

He kissed her back then softly nuzzled her ear. ‘How was it?'

‘Nice.'

‘Just nice?' he said, a little flatly.

‘Very nice,' she said, and kissed his upper lip.

‘That's all?'

‘The earth moved,' she said teasingly.

‘Not the whole universe?'

‘I think the whole universe probably moved too,' she said
quietly. She felt him contract and she clenched him with her muscles, trying to hold him there for longer. Their eyes danced with each other. They had been married for four years and were still wildly in love.

She pulled her fingers through his thick, wavy hair, her heart still racing; he expanded then contracted a fraction inside her and fresh aftershocks of pleasure resonated through her. She breathed deeply, the pounding in her heart only slowly beginning to subside.

‘God, I love you so much, Sarah,' he said.

‘I love you too,' she said.

Over sixty-four million of the sperm were dead now, but most of them still carried on with their journey, travelling as fast as the ones that were still alive, propelled like flotsam on a riptide by the contractions of the uterine muscle.

A mere three thousand were still living when they reached the mouth of the Fallopian tube. A further two thousand died, either crushed, asphyxiated, or exhausted in the next inch of the journey. One solitary sperm, alive and healthy, finally reached the egg ahead of the rest.

From its mouth it spat an enzyme that acted like a paralysing anaesthetic on the cells surrounding the egg, enabling it to push them apart. From its feet it excreted a glue that enabled it to bond to the outer zone of the egg. Then it began to tunnel through the heavily protected protein shell. Finally it reached the egg inside and began to fuse with it.

The sperm's task was nearly over. Its long, stringy tail dropped off and was discarded. The sperm's nucleus entered the egg and within minutes the egg had begun to divide. The sperm and the nucleus each carried twenty-three chromosomes – a half set. Each chromosome carried between 50,000 to 100,000 genes, which carried between them three billion units of DNA. Like all eggs, this one contained an X chromosome. The sperm contained a Y.

By the time Sarah Johnson had fallen asleep, she was pregnant with a baby boy. Neither she nor her husband, Alan, had any forebodings that night. They had no way of
knowing then, as they lay in each other's arms, that the child they yearned for so much would kill her without ever having spoken a word.

Georgetown
,
Washington
.
September
,
1994

The bird hung motionless in the sky above the small boy, its wings outstretched, as if suspended by invisible threads. Slowly, like the blades of a helicopter, it began to rotate on its own axis: a giant, black predator scouring the landscape beneath it for quarry.