The Apothecary

Chapter 22

The Pillar of Salt



Jin Lo climbed into the Morrison shelter and gathered all of the salt onto a piece of paper, carefully brushing up every loose grain with her finger, even after I was sure she had them all. I still didn’t believe that the salt was the apothecary, but I could see how she wouldn’t want to leave a whole leg behind. She bent the paper and poured it into the clean beaker. Then she brought the beaker out of the shelter. She still had the marks of tears on her face, but she was steady again.

“Where he work?” she asked.

Benjamin looked around the paper-strewn office and raised his hands to offer it up. “Here,” he said.

“No,” she said. “Real work. Laboratory.”

Benjamin shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“Must be in house.”

“It’s not upstairs. That’s where we live.”

I looked around the room, which had no doors except the one to the shop. “What about the locked door in the cellar?” I asked.

We all climbed back down the ladder into the dark, and Pip got out his wire to start working on the heavy iron door’s lock.

“No time,” Jin Lo said. “Hold please.”

She handed me the beaker, moved Pip aside, and kicked open the door with what I guess you’d call a kung fu kick. The door swung on its hinges, and she walked calmly through and turned on a light. Benjamin and Pip watched, impressed.

We all followed her into what was, as she had promised, a laboratory. Where the cellar looked dusty and unused, the lab was spotless and orderly, with rows of shining bottles and jars. It had an oven against one wall, a sink, and a row of gas burners. There were beakers and vials and crucibles, and mortars and pestles in different sizes: Some were made of wood and some of white marble, but one bowl looked like black onyx, and one like green jade.

Jin Lo started to move around the lab like a chef moving around her own kitchen, pulling out an enormous copper pot. She emptied the white liquid from a large bottle into it, and a clear liquid from another, and lit a burner underneath.

“You’re not going to put my father in there,” Benjamin said.

“We wait too long,” she said, pouring black seeds into the green jade mortar, “harder to change. You want him like this?” She handed me the mortar and pestle. “Crush,” she said.

“But what if we do something wrong?” Benjamin persisted.

Jin Lo surveyed the shelves again, and slapped Pip’s hand away from a jar that said LICORICE ROOT.

“Just one little bit?” he pleaded.

She ignored him. I started grinding the black seeds with the heavy pestle.

“I need a minute with the beaker,” Benjamin said.

Jin Lo looked at him. “Is salt,” she said.

Benjamin’s jaw was set firmly. “I still do,” he said. “It’s my father.”

Jin Lo sighed at this sentimentality and let him have the beaker. Benjamin held it in both hands and turned away from us. He was telling his father something, but even in the small room, I couldn’t hear the words.

The liquid in the pot had started to boil, and Jin Lo added a dark red powder, and then a yellow paste that she measured in spoonfuls from a jar. She took the mortar and inspected my work, then gave it a few more emphatic grinds with the pestle and poured the powdered seeds in. She stirred the pot, and lifted the wooden spoon experimentally: As it boiled, the solution had started to thicken into a greenish-brown ooze. It glopped off the spoon back into the pot. She leaned over and sniffed it. “Now,” she said to Benjamin.

He looked at the pot. “I can’t,” he said, clutching the beaker.

“Now,” she said. “Will be too late, too thick.”

“Have you done this before?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “I read how.”

“What if you remember wrong?”

Jin Lo shrugged. “Then he stay salt.”

I could feel Benjamin’s fear of letting his father go, and of never being able to get him back. Finally he handed the beaker to Jin Lo and turned away, unable to watch as she dumped his father into the goo.

Pip pulled over a footstool so he could see inside the pot, and I stood on tiptoe. As Jin Lo stirred, the mixture took on a stickier consistency. At first, nothing happened. I realised I wasn’t breathing. I didn’t think Pip was either. I thought of the witches in Macbeth, hunched over the cauldron, waiting for their evil magic to happen. Was it “eye of newt and tongue of frog”? Something like that.

Jin Lo pulled the glop up out of the pot with the spoon, working and stretching it like toffee. Each time she pulled, some of it stayed stretched for a moment. Benjamin couldn’t stand it and turned to look. I thought I saw something like a knee forming as Jin Lo pulled. It held its shape for a second before sinking back into the pot. I blinked, thinking I’d imagined it. Then I was sure I saw part of an arm, before it sank back in.

Then the whole mixture started to boil up over the lip, and the shape of the apothecary’s head emerged and sank down again. Then his head returned with both shoulders. Two sticky hands gripped the sides of the pot and pushed his torso and then his legs up out of the ooze. He stepped onto the counter, towering over us, and Jin Lo handed him a linen towel to cover the nakedness that would be revealed when all the goo dripped off. He wrapped it around his waist automatically, like a man at the beach, and she handed him a second towel to wipe his face and arms. Pip stared with his mouth open. I’m sure I did, too. Jin Lo had reconstituted the apothecary out of a tiny pile of salt, and he was standing there in front of us, whole and alive.

He looked around, dazed, and held out his hands in front of him, staring at them. Then he saw his son looking up at him from below. “Benjamin!” he said.

Pip stepped off his footstool and offered it to the apothecary, who climbed down from the counter. He wiped ooze off his pale chest, and it plopped to the floor. Benjamin threw his arms around his father, and the apothecary looked surprised, then wrapped his arms around Benjamin, too. I remembered their argument in the shop, and how little Benjamin had wanted to be an apothecary, and I wondered if it had been a long time since they hugged like this. Benjamin was as tall as his father, but rested his head on his shoulder with his eyes closed, like a kid. I had a pang, thinking of my own parents, who were out in the country knowing nothing about where I was.

When Benjamin and his father released each other, Jin Lo stepped forward and extended her hand. “I am Jin Lo.”

The apothecary blinked at her. “You are?”

“Not safe here,” she said. “We go now. You have clothes?”

“I’m so sorry,” he said. “In our correspondence, I had thought you were—well, a man.”

Jin Lo shrugged, as if she got that all the time. She was extraordinarily pretty, especially when she stopped looking annoyed and looked relieved, as she did now that the apothecary was back.

Mr Burrows took in all of us now. “You’re the American girl,” he said to me.

“Yes,” I said. “Janie. This is Pip.”

“Pip,” he said, still dazed, and he turned to Jin Lo. “How long has it been? Have I missed the test?”

“No,” she said. “We meet at boat tomorrow.”

“What test?” Benjamin asked.

The apothecary rubbed his sticky forehead. “I haven’t finished preparing.”

“You have things you need?” Jin Lo asked.

“Yes, of course,” he said, wiping his face. Most of the ooze had dripped off him now, onto the floor. Benjamin found him a spare pair of spectacles. He took a folded change of clothes from a cupboard and quickly pulled them on, then looked around at his shelves. From another cupboard, he took a black leather medical bag and started filling it with bottles. Jin Lo helped, suggesting items.

“I have to go to the Physic Garden,” the apothecary said, and I realised he couldn’t know.

“The gardener’s dead,” I said.

The apothecary stared at me.

Just then Pip looked up, with a twig of licorice root in his mouth. “Shh!” he said. He pointed to the ceiling.

We listened. There were footsteps upstairs.

“Is there a way out, down here?” I whispered.

The apothecary shook his head. He took a jar of grey powder off the shelf and handed it to Jin Lo, who opened it and nodded, as if she understood. She took a long glass tube from a rack of tools and stuck it into the powder like a drinking straw.

The apothecary picked up his medical bag in silence.

Jin Lo climbed the ladder first, carrying the jar of powder, and I followed close behind her. I saw the backs of two men crouched in the shop, inspecting the disturbed Morrison shelter. I couldn’t see their faces, but I knew from their shapes that it was Danby and the Scar.

Jin Lo crept silently towards the door. I climbed out of the cellar, but I wasn’t as soundless as Jin Lo. A floorboard squeaked, and the men heard me and turned.

The Scar lunged for me, but Jin Lo pulled the straw from the jar and blew a cloud of grey powder in their faces. Both men clutched their eyes. Danby shouted, and the Scar said something in German. He stumbled towards Jin Lo, trying blindly to grab her, but she slipped past him.

We ran through the ruined shopfront and out the front door, followed by Benjamin and his father and Pip. Danby and the Scar tried to chase after us, but crashed blindly into the standing shelves, unable to see.

“Is that stuff permanent?” Benjamin asked as we walked quickly down Regent’s Park Road, but not so quickly that we would draw attention.

“Oh, no,” his father said. “It would be a terrible thing to blind someone.”

“Not so terrible to blind those two,” Benjamin said.

“Oh, yes,” his father said. “Even them.”