The Alchemaster's Apprentice

The Sheet


After only a few days at the castle, Echo had acquired two friends: an eccentric bird and a Cooked Ghost. Beggars couldn’t be choosers in Ghoolion’s ancient pile, so you had to take what you could get in the way of company. But even a Crat subscribed to the principle that friendship entails obligations, so he felt bound to cultivate those acquaintances, however peculiar.

The Cooked Ghost disappeared for days after Ghoolion had shooed it away, but it must have remained on the premises because it suddenly turned up again. Its manner at first was timid and hesitant, but as time went by it became increasingly confident - if a ghost could be described as such. It seemed to enjoy being near Echo, who gave a terrible start whenever the shimmering thing came sailing through a solid stone wall or bobbed up through the flagstones like a figure in a puppet theatre. In time, however, he got used to it. It never came too close but floated at a respectful distance behind him when he sauntered along the passages. If he halted, the ghost would also stop short and hover there, patiently and unobtrusively, until he walked on. That was all there was to their relationship - silent proximity - and Echo sometimes wondered what the ghost got out of it.

His private name for it was ‘the Sheet’, which shows how little it now unnerved him. He had almost completely lost his original fear of it, having grasped that the ghost was no more dangerous than a curtain stirring in the breeze. There were times, however, when the sight of it did still make his blood run cold. This happened whenever he seemed to glimpse a kind of face in the floating ectoplasm. The phenomenon, which never lasted for more than a few seconds, looked as if a scary mask with a gaping mouth and no eyes were pressing against it from behind. Echo would have liked to talk the Sheet out of this undesirable habit, but alas, Cooked Ghost was not among the languages in his repertoire.

The Sheet even followed Echo up to the roof, where it would suddenly seep through the tiles and pursue him up and down the stairways for hours on end. At night it often hovered beside his basket until he went to sleep and sometimes it would still be there when he awoke in the morning.

But the Sheet was no less scared of the Alchemaster than anyone else in Malaisea. As soon as Echo heard his clattering, iron-shod footsteps, the ghost would instantly disappear through some wall or painting or the floor and refrain from showing itself again for a long time thereafter. Thus, Ghoolion was unaware of its continued presence in the castle. For some reason he himself could not have defined, Echo had refrained from telling the Alchemaster about his relations with the Sheet and Theodore T. Theodore.

One warm summer night his nocturnal perambulations brought him to the big room filled with dust-sheeted furniture. He was once more accompanied by the ghost, which had turned up at some stage and was floating doggedly after him. When they entered the room, however, it came to an abrupt halt, fluttered to and fro like a terrified bird, and fled back in the direction they had come from.

Echo walked on into the room. He had stopped trying to fathom his new friend’s motives. For reasons that remained a mystery, the Sheet kept on turning up, manifested itself at the most diverse times of day and vanished as abruptly as it had appeared. It couldn’t have fled at Ghoolion’s approach on this occasion, or Echo would have heard his unmistakable footsteps long ago.

He found this room one of the creepiest in the entire castle. Even though it contained nothing genuinely frightening, his imagination was so stimulated at night by the enshrouded pieces of furniture that he could readily picture some dangerous creature lurking beneath each dust sheet, ready to burst forth and pounce on him. There! Hadn’t that fold of cloth stirred? Wasn’t it bulging as if something were breathing beneath it? Or was the material merely billowing in the wind? Whatever the truth, Echo wanted to cross the room as quickly as possible. He scampered nimbly between the wardrobes and chests of drawers, wing chairs and sofas, which looked to him like snow-bound giants. What kinds of decay did they harbour? What was in those wardrobes and chests of drawers? He could imagine pullulating maggots and woodworms, but also drawers full of desiccated eyes and mummified hands, shelves laden with skulls and chests filled with grinning teeth. He kept casting nervous sidelong glances at the white mountains of cloth, prepared at any moment for a sheet to be rent asunder and a skeleton to emerge with glowing embers in its eye sockets and fangs smeared with blood. He had almost reached the door. Only one last cloth-swathed colossus barred his path. Perhaps the dust sheet concealed a big oak cupboard, perhaps a guillotine and its headless victim. He had just slalomed round the bulky piece of furniture with the exit already in sight when he heard a strange sound.

He came to a halt.

And listened.

There was someone else in the room.

The fur on the back of his neck stood on end. It wasn’t a loud, frightening or menacing sound, but subdued and exceedingly mournful.

Someone was sobbing.

And Echo knew who it was, because at that moment he caught a whiff of something familiar and not particularly pleasant - something to which he had become accustomed: Ghoolion’s alchemical body odour.

He stole back into the room. All his fear had gone. Now he was motivated by curiosity alone. He paused behind a wing chair, then crawled beneath it and peered cautiously from his hiding place.

There he was: Ghoolion. The Alchemaster was seated in an armchair nearby, and he was weeping.

Echo had thought at first that he might be giggling softly to himself. It would have been considerably more in character for the old devil to be sitting there in the dark, sniggering at some diabolical scheme he had just concocted. But he was sobbing beyond a doubt. The circumstances were unusual in every other respect as well. For one thing, Echo found it remarkable that the Alchemaster should be sitting down at all. It dawned on him that he usually saw Ghoolion standing up or walking around, seldom seated, far less lying down. There was nothing demonic or authoritarian about him as he sat slumped there, shaking all over. All his strength and kinetic energy seemed to have evaporated; he was just a picture of misery. He sat there as if the air weighed on him like lead. His shoulders sagged, his head was bowed, his whole body was shaking with convulsive sobs.

Echo was not only astonished to see Ghoolion weeping, he was stunned, not least because he’d never believed him capable of such emotion. The sight moved him so profoundly that a tear trickled down his own nose and he emitted a muffled sob - which he promptly regretted. Instantly, Ghoolion sprang to his feet like a jack-in-the-box and froze, a gaunt shadow silhouetted against one of the lofty windows. ‘Who’s there?’ he snarled.

The words positively exploded in Echo’s ears. He darted out of his hiding place and scampered to the door as if someone had set his tail on fire, then sped like a rocket through a series of rooms, along various passages and down the stairs. He didn’t dare stop until he was three floors below in a library filled with ancient books and redolent of the cold ashes in the fireplace. He crept beneath a worm-eaten lectern and listened with a pounding heart to see if Ghoolion had followed him, but all he could hear were the rustling wings of some Leathermice performing their nocturnal aerobatics beneath the library ceiling.