David was about to get off the ice—he hadn’t been skating in years and he considered it a miracle that he hadn’t taken a fall yet—but in deference to his niece, he agreed to go around the rink with her for one more lap. After all, it was Christmas Eve.
It was cold, but still bright and sunny out, and as they skated past Sarah, sitting on the bench and wrapped in a long down coat and a woolen cap pulled down tight around her ears, David shouted, “You hanging in there?”
Sarah nodded and gave him a thumbs-up.
“Then we’ll be right back!” And still holding Emme by her mittened hand, David sailed back into the crowd of kids and teenagers weaving their way around the rink to the tinny, amplified sound of “Frosty the Snowman.” It was a picture out of Currier and Ives—the frozen pond in the park, the skaters in their stocking caps and colorful leggings, their breath fogging in the air.
And it felt good to be out and exercising in the open air, especially as he had felt trapped in the whirlwind of his own thoughts ever since Mrs. Van Owen’s visit to the library. It had been the single most surreal moment in his entire life, and even after he’d run outside to return her pen—and she’d assured him that she meant every word she’d said—he’d been consumed by her promises. On the one hand, he knew it was insane—how could she possibly guarantee to save his sister’s life? No one could do that. But on the other, there was that business card, with the one-million-dollar offer on it. What kind of treatments or care or special attention could a million bucks bring? Plenty, he thought. He kept the card tucked away in his wallet, but he was never unaware of its being there. It just didn’t feel right—and he wondered if it was the kind of thing he should divulge to Dr. Armbruster … although he noticed, guiltily, that he hadn’t.
In an effort to forget about the distractions and just get on with the work, he had thrown himself into reading through the remaining pages of The Key to Life Eternal, presumably written in Cellini’s own hand. And as the secrets of the manuscript revealed themselves, he had come to understand what was driving Kathryn Van Owen and her search for La Medusa.
She believed in it.
She believed that the book was true, and that the glass truly held the power of immortality. As she had told him outside the Newberry, she had never entrusted this particular document, in its entirety, to anyone but him.
“Guard it carefully,” she had said. “You are the first person that I believe can make sense—and use—of it in your search. Do not disappoint me.”
As it turned out, the Key was not only an account of Cellini’s experiments with sorcery—the disinterment of dead bodies from holy ground, the construction of strange devices designed to nurture homonculi, the quest for the Philosopher’s Stone—it was also a detailed account of his own obsessive quest for immortality. Not content with the marvelous creations he had already made, or the artistic genius he had been blessed with, he had enlisted the help of a Sicilian magician named Strozzi and gone in search of the greatest gift of all—life everlasting. What he wanted was nothing less than all the time in the world—time in which he could re-create Nature in its most idealized forms, and craft things, from statues to fountains, paintings to glittering parures, of unmatched beauty and ingenuity. He reminded David of another great, if fictional, figure—Faust—who was prepared to sell his own soul for the knowledge acquired through immortality.
And in perhaps its eeriest passage, he recounted a hallucinatory (or so David had to assume) expedition to the underworld, led by Dante himself. Cellini claimed to have found not only the secret of invisibility—in a clump of bulrushes—but the secret of eternity, too. It lay in the water from the infernal pool, a few drops of which he had preserved beneath the glass of La Medusa. The mirror, Cellini wrote, could grant this gift, but only “se il proprietario lo sa come approfondire”—or, “if its owner knows how to use it.” In his Tuscan dialect, he went on to explain how the mirror must be held—“closely and directly, as if staring into one’s own soul”—and graced by the light of the moon, “the constant, but ever-changing, planet above us.” He concluded with an admonition: “But it is a boon less simple, less desirable, than may be thought, and I do fear that great anguish and misfortune may ensue.”
Tell that, David thought, to Mrs. Van Owen, as he distractedly embarked on one more circle of the rink.
“Amanda!” Emme screeched, before abruptly dropping her uncle’s hand and skating off to join her best friend, who was just teetering her way onto the ice.
David took that as his cue to skate over to the edge of the rink and plop down on the bench next to Sarah.
“Looks like she got a better offer,” he said, unlacing his skates.