The Alchemaster's Apprentice - By Walter Moers Page 0,136

sulphur, which sent up a tall jet of flame and ignited the taxidermal specimen of a twin-tailed Crocodiddle mounted on the ceiling.

Echo skipped excitedly to and fro on the end of his chain. Chaos, panic - a palace revolution! Great! Some of the smallest of Ghoolion’s victims were rising in revolt, spurred on by the Cooked Ghost, which fluttered overhead like a rebel flag in a gale. The Alchemaster hadn’t expected this for a moment. Scores were being settled here. He was paying for all his cruelty to the Anguish Candles, and they were showing their gratitude to Echo for having put some of them out of their misery. Hadn’t Ghoolion himself said that the greatest solutions should be sought in the smallest of objects?

The liberated Leyden Manikins also joined in. They knocked over jars and retorts whose liquid and powdered contents ignited or exploded. They opened valves and released gases that turned into hissing jets of flame as soon as they came into contact with the general conflagration. Splinters of glass went flying through the air, which was thick with coloured fumes and stank of sulphur. The hisses and bangs were reminiscent of a firework display. This was a coup d’état, an insurrection! And in the midst of it all, on fire, dancing around and crying blue murder, was the Alchemaster. He eventually dashed out of the room like a living torch.

Echo couldn’t help coughing and sneezing all at once. Smouldering immediately beside the alchemical furnace was some red powder whose fumes were almost asphyxiating him. He tugged vainly at his chain, realising only now how dangerous his own predicament was. The entire laboratory was likely to go up in flames and turn into a blazing inferno. It would be only a matter of a few seconds before some even more dangerous substances ignited: phosphorus, petroleum and gunpowder, a mixture capable of sending the whole castle sky-high. Resin from the smouldering Crocodiddle on the ceiling was dripping on Echo’s head.

And then Ghoolion returned, smoking like an extinguished bonfire. His face was black with soot. He had divested himself of the remains of his cloak and armed himself instead with a sodden blanket. Eyes glinting murderously, he used this to belabour any object that was burning or smouldering.

‘Take that! And that!’ he yelled as he brought the blanket whistling down on the smaller fires. ‘And that! And that!’ He worked his way methodically across the laboratory, extinguishing one after another. Then he flung the coal-black blanket aside, seized a shovel, and smothered the bigger flames with sand from a fire bucket. The blazing sulphur barrel he simply hurled out of the window, the Crocodiddle he knocked off the ceiling and disposed of likewise.

‘Now for you lot,’ he said, meaning the Anguish Candles and the Leyden Manikins. He proceeded to hunt them down, mercilessly smashing one little creature after another with his shovel or trampling them beneath his iron-soled boots. ‘There, take that, you confounded rabble!’ He dispatched every last one. All that remained of them were motionless splodges of wax or little mounds of peat from the Graveyard Marshes of Dullsgard, the Leyden Manikins’ principal ingredient.

In the end he stood panting in the midst of a battlefield of debris and splintered glass from which plumes of grey, black and poisonous yellow smoke were rising. He looked around. The laboratory was badly damaged but not completely wrecked. The Alchemaster had quelled the rebellion with a sodden blanket and a shovel.

‘You!’ he bellowed, his voice shaking with anger. He aimed his forefinger at the Cooked Ghost, which was still fluttering overhead. ‘Now it’s your turn!’

He flung the shovel at it like a spear, but it darted aside and the shovel crashed into a shelf laden with test tubes.

‘You!’ Ghoolion yelled again, and he went for the Cooked Ghost with his bare hands. To Echo, the Alchemaster’s malign energy, boundless fury and thirst for revenge were almost physically palpable. The Cooked Ghost flinched away as if Ghoolion had struck it with a whip. Then it flew round him in a wide arc and soared up to the ceiling, where it hovered for a moment, trembling. Finally, it swooped down and dived into the bubbling cauldron of fat from which it had once arisen. It did not reappear.

A Temporary Reprieve

Echo’s execution was temporarily postponed. Ghoolion proceeded to restore order in the laboratory, substitute more instruments and chemicals for the ones that had been destroyed, repair the damaged tubes and piping, and remix the spilt