The Alchemaster's Apprentice - By Walter Moers Page 0,24

as day, projecting multiple versions of the Alchemaster’s shadow on the walls. Startled, Echo dived under a stool. He waited anxiously for the thunder to die away, then asked in a tremulous voice: ‘When are we going to do our trick, Master?’

Ghoolion stared at him vaguely, like someone suffering from memory loss and trying to recall the name of the person addressing him.

‘Hm?’ he said. He peered into the massive cauldron. ‘The ghost brew is hot enough,’ he muttered. ‘The electrification of the atmosphere and the extreme humidity shouldn’t be detrimental to the success of the experiment - conditions are positively ideal, in fact. Good, let’s begin. I’m going to cook a ghost. Will you assist me?’

‘Only if I don’t have to eat it!’ Echo replied.

Ghoolion laughed hoarsely. ‘Don’t worry. We can start right away. Everything is in readiness.’

He went over to an iron cabinet and opened it. A dense cloud of icy vapour flowed out, almost concealing him from view as he rummaged around inside. At length he brought out two balls of fat and held them up to the candlelight.

‘Graveyard Gas and Murkholm Mist,’ he said. ‘That’s all we need. This is going to be a very simple ghost.’

He closed the cabinet, strode back to the cauldron and tossed one of the balls into the seething liquid. As it melted, Echo heard a high-pitched, long-drawn-out sigh that almost froze his blood.

‘That was some gas from the Graveyard Marshes near Dullsgard,’ Ghoolion explained. ‘It doesn’t matter much what former living creature it belonged to. It’s dead, that’s the main thing.’

Echo plucked up his courage and leapt on to a table for a better view of what was happening inside the cauldron.

Ghoolion tossed the second ball into the brew. As the fat melted, a tiny white snake wriggled out of it, swam around on the seething surface for a while and then submerged.

‘That was a sample of Murkholm Mist. Incredible, the treatment that semi-organic substance can stand. You can boil it in water, even in molten lead or hydrochloric acid. You can put it in the alchemical furnace and subject it to extreme temperatures. You can encase it in ice for a year, marinate it in mercury, shut it up in a vacuum, batter it with a sledgehammer. None of those things will affect it. But watch …’

Ghoolion produced a flute from his cloak. Then he put it to his lips and proceeded to play a simple, melodious tune that sounded like the setting to a nursery rhyme. The vaporous white snake surfaced once more, writhing like a worm on a hook. Ghoolion stopped playing.

‘Music. Music drives it insane,’ he said. ‘It can’t endure music, however beautiful, except trombophone music. You see? It’s dying. It’s committing suicide by dissolving in the water. Now it’s combining with the Graveyard Gas. That’s the second stage.’

Echo watched in fascination as the vaporous snake sank beneath the surface of the brew and dissolved. Hearing a noise, he looked over at the Leyden Manikins. For some reason they had started to rampage around inside their jars and hammer on the glass sides. Ghoolion paid no attention. Reaching into the pocket of his cloak, he brought out some black powder and tossed it into the cauldron. The liquid reacted in a surprising manner. It turned green, then red, then purple and finally green again.

‘The desiccated dung of Time-Snails,’ said Ghoolion, as casually as if he’d added a pinch of pepper. ‘What happens next has no real scientific basis. It’s simply a way of killing time until the requisite chemical and interdimensional processes in the cauldron have taken place. This is when the traditional spells are chanted. They don’t do a thing, but I can’t help it, I’m fond of the old hocus-pocus.’

He cleared his throat, threw up his arms and declaimed:

‘Let my magic brew revive

that which used to be alive.

Let my bubbling cauldron seethe

till the creature starts to breathe.

Brought to life it then shall be

by the power of alchemy.’

Echo, who was watching everything closely from his elevated vantage point, saw the contents of the cauldron change colour several times and release some iridescent bubbles, which went floating across the laboratory. Ghoolion continued to declaim:

‘Graveyard Gas and Murkholm Mist,

mingled by an alchemist,

can from their mephitic haze

other-worldly phantoms raise.

Spirit, from my brew arise

and take shape before our eyes!’

The liquid swirled up and down, down and up, and the rising bubbles were sucked back into the depths by the little whirlpools that formed here and there. Echo had never