The Alchemaster's Apprentice

Uggly Lane


On a misty night, Uggly Lane looked as if a gang of huge brigands in pointed hats had settled down beside a winding street and were lying in wait for passers-by. As he stole past them, Echo was overcome by the uneasy feeling that the crouching giants might rise to their feet at a secret signal and cudgel him to death. There was something both dead and alive about them - something that reminded him unpleasantly of the horrific taxidermal specimens in Ghoolion’s castle. He was as reluctant to turn his back on those figures as he was on the houses in this lane. He had entered a melancholy limbo midway between this world and the next.

The wooden boardwalk gave an agonised groan as Echo put his weight on it. He flinched and quickly got down in the roadway, which wasn’t paved like the rest of the streets in the town and consisted of stamped earth. Plump beetles and other insects were scuttling around on it, but he felt marginally safer in the middle of the lane than he did in the immediate vicinity of the spooky-looking houses.

Wisps of mist were flitting around like Cooked Ghosts, sometimes concealing whole houses from view. An owl hooted, and Echo shivered because the sound reminded him of Theodore.

‘Tuwituwu! Tuwituwu!’

‘What on earth am I doing here?’ he asked himself, peering anxiously in all directions. ‘No one with any sense visits Uggly Lane in the middle of the night. Why didn’t I come here during the day?’

Then he remembered why: because he wouldn’t be able to tell which of the houses was occupied until it was lit up after dark - Theodore had made a point of that. But with all due respect to the Tuwituwu’s good advice, not even the most foolhardy of Malaisea’s stray cats and dogs would ever do such a hare-brained thing. There were too many stories told about the reckless individuals who had ventured into the lane by night, only to meet a gruesome end there.

The story of the Decapitated Tomcat, for example, which was said to appear in the backstreets of Malaisea on the stroke of midnight and the anniversary of its death, walking upright on two legs and carrying its own tear-stained head between its forepaws.

Or the story of the Four Fearless Mongrels, which had gone exploring here for a bet when the moon was full. They returned the following night - amalgamated into a single animal! The poor creatures had been sliced in half and sewn together below the breastbone to form a horrific hybrid with eight forelegs and four heads. But the worst part of the story was that, driven insane by their fate, the four dogs had tried to run in different directions and ripped themselves apart with a frightful rending sound.

Echo was also reminded of the grisly tale of Sweet Siamantha, a greedy Siamese cat which had visited Uggly Lane in her unending search for sweet things to eat. She was now reputed to roam Malaisea at night, her body stripped of its fur and crisply roasted, a carving knife stuck in her belly and a meat fork protruding from her back.

But Echo found these scary stories less perturbing than the actual presence of the Ugglies’ houses. They were such awe-inspiring buildings that not even Ghoolion had dared to have them demolished after evicting their occupants. There was something about their gnarled, organic appearance that made them look inviolable and lent them an aura of venerable indestructibility. Moreover, their dark-brown wooden walls still harboured something - some kind of penetrating odour - which no pettifogging lawyers or bullying bureaucrats could drive out. This was the essence of Ugglydom itself, a clearly detectable source of energy that pervaded the entire lane, as potent as any evil curse.

Since Ugglies were legally prohibited from installing street lights, the only lighting was provided by the reflection of the moon in some rain-filled potholes. Echo paused beside one of these puddles, which looked in the gloom like a pool of blood.

He had now reached the end of the lane without spotting a single lighted window.

‘Good,’ he thought, feeling relieved. ‘There’s no one living here, so I’ll make myself scarce.’

He was just about to turn round when, only a few Crat’s lengths away, the wind wafted a shred of mist into the air like a conjurer whipping a cloth off a birdcage. It rose into the night sky and there, in the place where it had been hovering only a moment ago, stood the only house in the lane from which light was coming.

Echo didn’t move. He scowled at the building, which seemed to have sprouted from the ground like a mushroom. He’d been just about to beat a retreat on the pretext of having failed to find the confounded place, but there it was, and he could have sworn it was returning his gaze. Noticeably bigger than the rest, though not by much, it was the only detached house in the lane. Candlelight flickered fitfully behind its soot-encrusted windowpanes and Echo could hear music - a soft, haunting melody. Someone was singing in a deep voice and simultaneously beating time. It struck him as the ideal background music for a ritual in which dogs were sewn together or cats skinned alive.

For some inexplicable reason, however, the house exerted an attraction on him. ‘I could do with a little Placebo Wart Ointment,’ he murmured to himself as he trotted towards it. ‘And possibly a couple of quality-controlled curses as well.’

What was he talking about? Placebo Wart Ointment? Quality-controlled curses? Why should he suddenly develop a hankering for things he’d never even heard of? Why this irresistible urge to climb the steps of the veranda? What was that funny smell?

He was on the veranda before he knew it, right outside the Uggly’s front door. The little candlelight that filtered through the sooty windowpanes was just sufficient for him to read the noticeboards nailed to it.

Currently in Stock:



Quality-Controlled Curses

Prophecies of All Kinds

(Accuracy Not Guaranteed)

Placebo Wart Ointment

(Discreetly Packaged)



Aha, so those were the only kinds of services an Uggly was still permitted to offer in Malaisea. Ghoolion had certainly done a thorough job of making it hard for the Ugglies to practise their profession and utilise their special abilities.

Another notice board read:

Warning!



You enter these premises at your own risk. The ingestion of Ugglian pharmaceuticals, quality-controlled or not, can damage your health. Do not believe a word an Uggly says, especially when she claims to foretell the future. And, if you have a problem with warts, consult your GP or a pharmacist!

Succubius Ghoolion

Municipal Alchemaster-in-Chief





Yet another notice read:

This Establishment is Subject to





Municipal Ordinance No. 52736 pertaining to Ugglies





Should an offence against one of its provisions

come to your notice, kindly report this at once

to the Municipal Alchemaster-in-Chief.

The offender will be summarily punished

in your presence, if you so desire.



These noticeboards conveyed such a vivid impression of the bleak professional existence led by the Uggly who lived here that Echo suddenly felt profoundly sorry for her. Besides, his craving for some Placebo Wart Ointment had become quite overpowering, so he decided to make his presence known at last. But what was the best way to attract an Uggly’s attention? Should he call? Knock? Scratch at the door? Echo opted for a method he seldom employed: he miaowed as piteously and plaintively as he could. An encounter based on mutual compassion might be the best way of avoiding any unpleasantness.

The door opened almost at once, and more quietly than Echo would have thought possible in the case of so old a building. He had expected to hear rusty hinges squeal in agony, but the door half-opened as quietly as a flower coming into bloom. Nothing happened for a while. Then the silence was broken by a voice that sounded as if its owner had lived for centuries on unwholesome, trance-inducing substances.

‘If you aren’t the Alchemaster, come in.’

Cautiously, Echo squeezed through the crack. The contrast between the cool night air and the steamy atmosphere inside, which smelt of soup and other less familiar aromas, was such that he felt he’d been wrapped in damp cotton wool. The Uggly was standing with her back to him, lit by the dancing flames of a stove. The weird music had ceased.

‘You must be really hungry, p-ssycat,’ she said in a deep bass voice, ‘to come begging for food at night in Uggly Lane, of all places. Didn’t anyone tell you it’s haunted by the Decapitated Tomcat?’

‘I’m not hungry,’ said Echo. ‘Nor am I a p-ssycat.’

The Uggly turned round and Echo had to make a supreme effort to resist the impulse to dash out of the house, hissing and yowling. He had seen some real-live Ugglies in the days when there were still some left in Malaisea, but only at long range, because they exuded a very special scent which a Crat’s sensitive nose found hard to endure. Imagine a damp, hollow tree trunk in which a whole family of polecats has died and decomposed, and you may gain some inkling of an Uggly’s body odour. Hitherto, Echo had only seen the creatures from afar, so his sightings of them had been rendered indistinct by distance, but now he was face to face with a full-grown specimen.

The Uggly’s face was a living affront to all the laws of harmony. Her nose seemed to have grown first to the right, then to the left, then to the right again, and it tapered to a point disfigured by a third nostril. The other two nostrils were so unnaturally flared that you could see up them even if you were taller than the Uggly herself. Thick, greasy tufts of hair sprouted from them like mouldy strands of eelgrass from submarine caves. Her pupils and irises differed in size and colour, her lips were grotesquely thick and painted black, and her ears protruded further than those of a Leathermouse. Her skin was as pitted as the moon’s surface, and standing up here and there were wiry hairs resembling bent rusty nails. The rest of her body was mercifully concealed beneath an ankle-length robe of coarse black linen gathered at the waist by a cord. On her head she wore the skin of an octopus.

‘You can speak?’ she said. ‘Then you aren’t a p-ssycat at all, you’re a Crat. I didn’t think there were any left in Malaisea.’

Echo started to relax. There was nothing menacing about her hideous looks. The best explanation for an Uggly’s outward appearance might be that it was Zamonian natural history’s attempt to indulge in a touch of black humour.

‘If you aren’t hungry, what brings you here?’

‘To be honest, an irresistible urge to buy a tube of wart ointment. Except that I don’t have any money,’ Echo confessed.

The Uggly’s demeanour underwent an immediate change. She opened her eyes still wider and stared at him with her hands fluttering nervously. Then she hurried over to a saucepan on the stove. Having put the lid on, she flapped her hands as if shooing away a swarm of midges.

‘Oh dear,’ she exclaimed, ‘I must have left the lid off my soup by mistake. How silly of me! Its fumes arouse an urge to buy my wares, which is, of course, strictly prohibited - and rightly so.’ She favoured Echo with a smile that almost sent him scampering out into the street. Her teeth might have been sculpted by a dentist anxious to promote dental hygiene in his patients by showing them examples of every dental disease known to science.

‘But only by mistake, as I said,’ she went on. ‘No need to report me to the Alchemaster, is there? Besides, you must have lost the urge to buy anything by now.’

Echo shook his head to clear it. He was feeling rather bemused. It was true: his urge to buy some Placebo Wart Ointment had vanished, like the curious aroma.

‘No, no,’ he said soothingly, ‘I’ve no wish to report anyone.’

Tearing his eyes away from the Uggly at last, he turned his attention to the interior. It looked more like a cave than a house - somewhere suited more to a bear than a civilised being, though it did contain various amenities such as a big iron stove, a kitchen cupboard, a table and chairs, and a shelf filled with books. Visible between them were some thick, dark-brown protuberances reminiscent of roots. More such rootlike excrescences were protruding from the damp mud walls and dangling from the ceiling. If Echo hadn’t known better, he would have thought the room was situated in the bowels of a forest.

‘So what do you want?’ the Uggly demanded, very suspiciously now. ‘Why should you be roaming around Uggly Lane in the middle of the night? Are you spying for Ghoolion?’

Echo decided to come straight to the point. The Uggly looked as if she could stand the truth.

‘My name is Echo,’ he said, ‘and I’ve made a contract with the Alchemaster. It’s a very unfavourable contract from my point of view, so I came to ask if you can help me to break it.’

A long silence ensued. The Uggly subjected him to a long, unabashed stare. He didn’t know what to make of it. Was she surprised? Annoyed? Amused?

‘Let me get this straight,’ she said at length. ‘Did you just ask me to help you break a contract with the Alchemaster?’

‘Yes,’ Echo said softly. He dropped his gaze, ashamed of his own presumption. What right had he to turn up at a complete stranger’s house in the middle of the night and make such a request? Looking up again, he just had time to see a bundle of twigs come whooshing towards him before he was struck and sent flying through the air. He crashed into the front door and fell to the floor. Before he could say anything, or even utter a cry of pain, the Uggly made an imperious gesture with her right hand. At this, the door swung inwards and hit him hard in the back. He went rolling across the floor and ended up at the old crone’s feet, whereupon she swung her besom once more and swept him out on to the veranda. Then the door slammed shut.

With a groan, he scrambled to his feet. How idiotic of him to pin his hopes on an Uggly, of all creatures! He could think himself lucky to have got off so lightly. He drew several deep breaths, made his way slowly down the veranda steps and went a little way back along the lane in the direction he’d come from. Then, in obedience to a sudden impulse, he turned and looked back.

Hypnotic music was once more issuing from the Uggly’s house. Dark and forbidding, it lay at the end of the lane like the severed head of a giant in whose eyes the last spark of life was being extinguished. Then the windows, too, went dark. A fluffy skein of mist came drifting along and enveloped the Uggly’s house like a shroud.

Echo looked up at the moon, which was floating, thinly veiled in clouds, above the Alchemaster’s castle. It was now half full.