The Alchemaster's Apprentice - By Walter Moers Page 0,26

the stories of castles inhabited by the restless spirits of departed ancestors.’

Echo looked up at the ghost, which was still hovering above him. It was, in fact, a beautiful sight, like a lustrous, flowing silver robe. Suddenly, however, he thought he caught a momentary glimpse of a weird face in its undulating folds. That startled him so much that he crouched down even lower beneath the chair.

‘But I can shoo it away if you prefer,’ said Ghoolion.

‘Could you really? In that case, please do! Please make it go away!’

Ghoolion simply raised his arms and took a couple of steps towards the ghost. Instantly, it rotated on its own axis, then raced round the laboratory, dived into the dark stonework between two bookcases and disappeared.

‘For some unknown reason,’ Ghoolion said with a sigh, ‘I have a deterrent effect on Cooked Ghosts. They never trust me. Odd, isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ said Echo, ‘very odd.’

Master and Pupil

Echo was now on fire with curiosity and intensely eager to learn more about the Alchemaster’s technique. What he didn’t know was that the Cooked Ghost’s materialisation was an age-old trick forming part of every experienced alchemist’s repertoire and designed to recruit apprentices.

Ghoolion’s plan was both simple and perfidious. What he needed for his experiments was a compendium of alchemistic knowledge, his own and other people’s. It would not, unfortunately, suffice to toss an alchemistic encyclopedia and his own scientific notes into the cauldron and boil them up together, as the quacks of olden days might have done. No, according to his calculations that knowledge had to be transmitted from one brain to another by telepathic means. He would have to drum it into the little Crat’s head in the old-fashioned way, so that he could boil it out again at a later stage. Echo was the only living creature in Malaisea capable of understanding him and absorbing his esoteric knowledge like a sponge. That was the true reason why the Alchemaster was willing to entrust the little Crat with something as well-guarded as the fundamental secrets of alchemy, together with the knowledge he himself had acquired.

Meanwhile, Echo believed that all this was being done purely for his personal amusement and entertainment. Being haunted by dark thoughts of his impending doom whenever he wasn’t busy eating or sleeping, he welcomed any occasion on which Ghoolion favoured him with his presence and his fascinating store of expert knowledge. He believed that the old alchemist did this partly for reasons of vanity and partly from a pent-up desire to communicate bred by long years of solitude.

You had to grant Ghoolion one thing: he was a brilliant teacher. Whenever he transformed himself into a sympathetic, omniscient mentor for Echo’s benefit, his whole demeanour changed. He sloughed off all his demonic, domineering, hectoring mannerisms like an ugly cocoon, his strident voice sank to a melodious murmur, his despotic manner vanished and his grim visage transformed itself into a kindly countenance.

He never gave Echo the feeling that he was teaching him something, far less drumming it into his head. No, Ghoolion’s lessons always took the form of a friendly chat, which only happened to touch on the weightiest problems of alchemy, and Echo played the carefree role of a naive prompter and questioner. He believed that all the mental exertion was undertaken by Ghoolion, who had to extract all this information from his vast treasure house of knowledge and expound it. In reality, however, it was Echo whose brains were being put to the test, because he was using a Crat’s true intellectual capacity for the very first time.

Ghoolion knew all there was to know about a Crat’s brain. He realised that a creature with a perfect command of every Zamonian language, animal languages included, was a genius, and that it must be capable of intellectual feats of quite another order. Echo’s brain was an absorbent sponge full of unused chambers and synapses, fresh cells and youthful tissue crackling with mental electricity. You could have read him the Atlantean register of births or the fundamentals of Zamonian mathematics aloud, and he would have memorised every word and numeral sufficiently to be able to recite them backwards on demand. But he was quite unaware of his gift. Because it had scarcely been tested in its brief existence, his young cerebral organ would provide the ideal vessel in which to deposit the Alchemaster’s whole store of knowledge - or at least its quintessence, which he had condensed into a compact system of handy formulae and