The Alchemaster's Apprentice

Ghoolion’s Laboratory


Echo did not wake up until Ghoolion extricated him from the depths of his black cloak. Sleepily, the little Crat surveyed his surroundings. The remarkable laboratory was festively illuminated by numerous candles burning amid retorts and iron cauldrons, on stacks of books and in many-branched candelabra, which cast long shadows over its walls. The air was filled with a chorus of long-drawn-out sighs and groans, but Echo couldn’t see any living creature capable of producing such sounds, so he attributed them to the wind blowing in through the windows.

The laboratory was situated on the top floor of the castle. Suspended above a coal fire in the middle of the room was a gigantic copper cauldron black with soot, and the soup simmering within it created fat bubbles that gave off a noisome stench. The crooked walls were partly concealed by rickety wooden shelves laden with books and scientific instruments, scrolls of parchment and stuffed animals.

Hanging here and there, too, were more of Ghoolion’s disaster paintings, slates covered with alchemistic symbols and mathematical diagrams, and maps illustrating astronomical constellations. Years of smoke and chemical fumes had stained the vaulted ceiling and warped it into a dark, undulating expanse of timber. Dangling from it on cords and chains were planetary and lunar globes, astronomical measuring instruments and stuffed birds and reptiles. Ancient tomes with gnarled leather covers and tarnished metal clasps were lying around all over the place, many with handwritten notes protruding from their dusty, cobwebby pages. Among them stood countless glass vessels of every size and shape, some empty, some filled with fluids or powders of various hues, and others occupied by Leyden Manikins tapping vainly on the walls of their transparent prisons. The rusty alchemical furnace that dominated this whole chaotic scene resembled an ironclad warrior standing guard over a battlefield.

Echo didn’t know where to look and what to fear the most when Ghoolion put him down on the floor. He had never seen so many astonishing and menacing objects under one roof. When he caught sight of a stuffed but lifelike Nanofox baring its teeth at him from one of the lower shelves, he arched his back and hissed with his tail fluffed out like a flue brush.


Ghoolion laughed. ‘He can’t hurt you any more,’ he said. ‘I gutted him, rendered him down for his fat, stuffed him with sawdust and wood shavings, and sewed him up again - it took me seven hundred stitches. I had to insert a wire armature in his jaw to reproduce the facial expression. That snarl of yours tells me I made a good job of it.’

Echo shuddered at the thought that the Alchemaster would gut him, extract his fat and stuff him with sawdust when the next full moon came round. He might even wire him up with his tail erect and his back arched in memory of this moment.

‘Now for our contract,’ said Ghoolion, and he withdrew a sheet of parchment covered with alchemistic symbols from a stack of documents. Taking pen and ink, he proceeded to scrawl on the back of it, which was blank. Echo found it far from pleasurable to watch him drawing up the contract. The Alchemaster was muttering to himself with such glee as he wrote, and his eyes were glittering with such undisguised malevolence, that the terms of the contract could hardly be to his, Echo’s, advantage. All he caught were phrases such as ‘irrevocably committed’, ‘indissolubly binding’, ‘legally enforceable’ and the like. In fact, however, he couldn’t have cared less how unreasonable Ghoolion’s terms were - just as long as he got something to eat in the very near future.

‘There,’ Ghoolion said at last. ‘Now sign!’

He held out a red ink pad. Echo applied his paw, first to the pad and then to the foot of the document. Before he could even glance at the wording, Ghoolion snatched the parchment away and stowed it in a drawer.

‘Take a look around,’ he commanded, indicating the room with a dramatic gesture. ‘This is your new home - the last you’ll ever have in your life, so I advise you to savour every moment. Imagine you’re dying, but painlessly, without the disagreeable symptoms of some terrible wasting disease. You can eat what you like while you’re dying. Consider yourself lucky! Very few creatures are granted such a pleasant end. I’ll try to make it as quick and painless as possible when the moment comes. I’m an expert.’ He gazed at his bony hand, which he had raised like an executioner showing his victim the lethal implement. ‘Now let’s start fattening you up right away. We mustn’t waste another moment of your precious time.’

Ghoolion’s heartless words gave Echo the shivers, but he did as he was told and took a look at his new - and very last! - home, trying to control his emotions and fears so as not to expose himself to any more of the Alchemaster’s barbed remarks. He wanted to study every detail of his surroundings because he knew from experience that fear subsides more quickly the more you look your fears in the face.

It struck him, as he surveyed the room, that the shadows on the walls were moving. The bulky shadow of the alchemical furnace, which had loomed over a bookcase a moment earlier, was now slanting across a grey slate covered with mathematical formulae. How could that be? Did the shadows in Ghoolion’s domain lead a life of their own? To Echo, anything seemed possible in this weirdest of all the buildings in Malaisea. But Crats are level-headed creatures, so he set about getting to the bottom of the mystery. Did the light sources move by mechanical means? Cautiously, he clambered over some worm-eaten books, made his way between two stacks of time-yellowed documents and squeezed past some big glass bottles thick with dust. Nearer and nearer he crept to one of the candles, only to be brought up short by a magnifying glass the size of a soup plate. He froze. His determination to show no sign of fear evaporated, for the sight that confronted him through the dirty lens was so bewildering, so startling and unreal, that it put all the laboratory’s other sensations in the shade: he saw a grotesquely magnified candle with a pain-racked face streaked with waxen tears. To his utter consternation, Echo saw that it was almost imperceptibly propelling itself along at a snail’s pace, sobbing and sighing as it went.

‘An Anguish Candle,’ Ghoolion explained with a touch of pride, stirring something in a big bowl. ‘One of my minor alchemical creations. It consists of candle wax, a Leyden Manikin and some snails from the Gargyllian Bollogg’s Skull, very slowly simmered over a low flame - plus one or two secret alchemical ingredients, of course. The wick is woven from the spinal column of a Blindworm and the ganglia of an Oxenfrog. Candles of this type are extremely sensitive to heat and spend their entire existence in the most terrible agony. Imagine if your tail were on fire - that’s the kind of agony I mean.’

‘What would happen if you blew it out?’ asked Echo, who was thoroughly unnerved by the sight of the tormented creature. He now saw that several more of the laboratory’s candles were propelling themselves along in an equally painful manner. If he strained his ears, he could even hear them moaning softly all around him.

‘Its sufferings would cease, of course,’ Ghoolion replied curtly. ‘But what’s the use of a candle that isn’t alight, let alone an Anguish Candle that doesn’t groan with pain?’

His tone implied that Echo wasn’t all there. With a shake of the head, he put down the bowl of sweetened cream he’d been stirring. Then, taking a small phial from a shelf, he added a few drops of some colourless liquid. Instantly, the cream was infused with the glorious scent of vanilla. To Echo, even that simple trick seemed like magic. He tore his eyes away from the Anguish Candle and fell on the bowl as if dying of thirst.

‘Steady, steady!’ Echo had only lapped up a couple of mouthfuls when Ghoolion took the bowl away and deposited it on a shelf out of his reach. ‘Not too much on an empty stomach! Besides, that cream was only an appetiser. We must proceed systematically. Everything has to be done on a scientific basis, and that includes fattening you up. So give me a list of your favourite dishes in exact order of preference. Which do you like best of all?’

Taking a pencil and a sheet of paper, Ghoolion gazed at Echo sternly. The little Crat knit his brow and searched his memory for favourite foods.

‘Best of all?’ he said. ‘Grilled mouse bladders. Grilled Piddlemouse bladders, to be precise.’

‘Right,’ said Ghoolion, and made a note. ‘Grilled Piddlemouse bladders. Hardly gourmet fare, but still. Go on …’