The Alchemaster's Apprentice

Ghoolion’s Torture Chamber


The feeling that overcame Echo whenever he watched Ghoolion cooking was a blend of amazement, fascination and disgust. Within his personal domain the Alchemaster was an omnipotent tyrant. Malaisea was his kingdom, the castle his stronghold, the laboratory his throne room - and the kitchen his torture chamber. The cleavers and boning knives, meat mallets, potato mashers and pans of boiling oil were his instruments of torture and execution, the foodstuffs his submissive slaves, who flung themselves into boiling water or on to a red-hot grill at his behest. Eggs waited humbly to be beheaded, poultry volunteered to be dismembered or spatchcocked, steaks to be beaten tender, lobsters to be boiled alive.

‘Beat me!’ cried the cream.

‘Reduce me!’ gasped the gravy.

‘Drown me in dressing!’ groaned the salad.

Ghoolion carved a joint or kneaded a lump of dough as if dissecting or throttling a living creature. Like an executioner, he hurried from one instrument of torture to another, from grill to chopping block, as if eager to scorch or scald or hack his victims to death. Tongues of fire licked greedily at his frying pans and ignited the hot oil. Yellow flames leapt high into the air, lighting up the Alchemaster in a dramatic fashion. Wind blew in through the open windows, plucking at the steam rising from his pots and pans and inflating his cloak. The old man’s performance at the stove would have made a good circus act.

‘Anyone who can’t stand the heat’, he called to Echo above the hiss of the flames, ‘has no business in the kitchen!’ He removed red-hot casseroles from the oven without gloves, dipped his fingers in boiling soup to taste it and scooped fried potatoes out of seething fat with his bare hands.

‘Of course I feel the pain,’ he said when he noticed Echo’s look of horror. ‘I don’t respect it, that’s all.’

When he hurried from one part of the kitchen to another - hurried, mark you, not dashed - his movements were economical and unerring. Nothing ever got burnt or boiled over. At the Restaurant Ghoolion, the Alchemaster was head chef, sauce chef, waiter, wine waiter and dishwasher all rolled up into one. No tasks were beneath his dignity. He performed them all with the same ceremonious care and attention. When he wielded a kitchen knife his fast-moving hands were a blur. One heard the machine-gun burst of the blade on the chopping board and there lay a heap of gossamer-thin onion rings, a mound of finely chopped chives or a consummate tuna tartare. He carved a joint of roast beef with the unruffled precision of a brain surgeon, so perfectly that no slice ever disintegrated. Without even looking, he flipped omelettes in the air as deftly as a fairground juggler. He tossed chopped herbs boldly into saucepans without dropping a single little thyme leaf. Echo saw him fillet cloves of garlic with a dissecting knife and a diamond-cutter’s magnifying glass, or lather apricots with whipped cream and shave them with a cut-throat razor because he considered their furry skins too bristly. He also witnessed an occasion when Ghoolion skewered a grain of caviar with a red-hot needle and kebabbed it under the microscope.

The discipline prevailing in Ghoolion’s kitchen was worthy of a Bookholmian fire station, its precision of a watchmaker’s workshop and its hygiene of an operating theatre. The gleaming knives were sterilised and restored to razor-edged sharpness every day. Every meat fork, egg whisk and copper kettle was burnished until it sparkled in the candlelight. The ready-peeled potatoes in the saucepan were as alike as peas in a pod, the shallots chopped into cubes of exactly equal size, the spice jars always well filled and smartly aligned like toy soldiers on parade. As for eating off the floor, in Ghoolion’s kitchen one really could have engaged in that proverbial activity without encountering a single bacterium. In those surroundings, any pathogen would have felt like a lone flea marooned on an alien planet impregnated with insecticide. The flagstones were sealed with floor polish. Sink, chopping boards, working surfaces - every cubic centimetre of the kitchen was regularly scrubbed with acetic acid and sal ammoniac. Ghoolion was afflicted with the same restlessness in his kitchen as he was in his laboratory. He blended herbs, pounded peppercorns in the mortar, mixed salad dressings, made stock from bones, salted butter, whipped cream, skimmed gravy or pickled eggs for future consumption. He never allowed himself a break.

When Ghoolion was engaged in preparing a menu his movements became so fluid that they acquired a balletic quality. The noises that surrounded him - the gurgling song of soup, the crackle of meat roasting in the oven, the hiss of flames and hot fat - combined with his clattering footsteps to produce a culinary symphony that made the saucepan lids dance to its melodic rhythms.

What surprised Echo, however, was that he very seldom saw the Alchemaster eat anything. The most Ghoolion ever did was to take a bite out of an apple or a slice of stale bread. He never even tasted the dishes he served his lodger and there wasn’t an ounce of fat on him. It was as if he denied himself the substance he coveted from other living creatures.

On the other hand he took a theoretical interest in every kind of food and its preparation. He was a walking encyclopedia when it came to recipes, cooking times, vitamin content, carving methods, food preservation, knife care, seasoning, marinating, blending or macerating. He was never too busy shuttling back and forth between stove and table to entertain Echo with some informative lecture. The little Crat learnt that, in addition to being fried, grilled or roasted, food could be ghoolionised or zamoniated, and that dressing a fowl did not mean dolling it up but using kitchen string to truss it into a shape suitable for roasting in the oven. Echo learnt all about the care of copper vessels, the great art of soufflé-making and Early Zamonian pressure-cooking techniques. No food was so uninteresting, no subject so dry or abstruse that Ghoolion could not strike some entertaining sparks from it. And he had recorded all this knowledge, all his notes, all his ideas on gourmandism and the art of cooking, by jotting them down in a big book with a smoked Marsh Hogskin cover. Whenever Echo wasn’t watching the Alchemaster at work in the kitchen, he liked to look through that wonderful culinary tome, which abounded in the most mouth-watering recipes.

One evening - the two of them were standing in front of a kitchen cupboard - Ghoolion suddenly laid aside the egg he was peeling. Unlocking the door, he invited Echo to look inside the cupboard and tell him what it contained. Echo did as he was bidden, but all he could see was a dusty jumble of unidentifiable kitchen utensils.

‘No idea,’ said Echo. ‘Just junk of some kind.’

‘That’, Ghoolion said in a voice quivering with rage, ‘is my dungeon for useless kitchen utensils. There’s one such in every kitchen worthy of the name. Its inmates are kept there like especially dangerous patients in a mental institution.’

He reached into the cupboard and brought out an odd-looking implement.

‘What cook’, he cried, ‘does not possess such a gadget, which can sculpt a radish into a miniature rose? I acquired it at a fair in one of those moments of mental derangement when life without a miniature-rose-cutting gadget seems unimaginable.’

He hurled the thing back into the darkness and brought out another.

‘Or this here, which enables one to cut potatoes into spirals five yards long! Or this, a press for juicing turnips! Or this, a frying pan for producing rectangular omelettes!’

Ghoolion took gadget after gadget from the cupboard and held them under Echo’s nose, glaring at them angrily.

‘What induced me to buy all these? What can one do with potato spirals long enough to decorate a banqueting hall? What demented voice convinced me in a whisper that I might some day be visited by guests with an insatiable hankering for turnip juice, rectangular omelettes and potatoes five yards long?’

He hurled the gadgets back into their dungeon with a look of disgust. Dust went billowing into the air and Echo sneezed involuntarily.

‘Why, I ask myself, don’t I simply chuck them all on to the rubbish dump? I’ll tell you that too. I keep them for one reason alone: revenge! I keep them just as medieval princes kept their enemies on starvation rations. A quick death on a rubbish dump would be too merciful. No, let them languish in a gloomy dungeon, condemned to everlasting inactivity. That’s the only condign punishment for a rectangular omelette pan!’

So saying, Ghoolion slammed the cupboard door and turned the key three times in the lock. Then he went on cooking as if nothing had happened.

From that day on, Echo regarded the kitchen cupboard - and the bottommost compartment in particular - with new eyes. No longer a cupboard, it was a medieval fortress whose dungeon harboured a terrible secret. He often slunk past it, and when all was quiet he would put his ear to the door and listen. And he sometimes fancied he could actually hear Ghoolion’s pitiful captives whimpering for mercy - pleading to be allowed to rust away on a rubbish dump.