The Alchemaster's Apprentice - By Walter Moers Page 0,4
stuffed animals.
Hanging here and there, too, were more of Ghoolion’s disaster paintings, slates covered with alchemistic symbols and mathematical diagrams, and maps illustrating astronomical constellations. Years of smoke and chemical fumes had stained the vaulted ceiling and warped it into a dark, undulating expanse of timber. Dangling from it on cords and chains were planetary and lunar globes, astronomical measuring instruments and stuffed birds and reptiles. Ancient tomes with gnarled leather covers and tarnished metal clasps were lying around all over the place, many with handwritten notes protruding from their dusty, cobwebby pages. Among them stood countless glass vessels of every size and shape, some empty, some filled with fluids or powders of various hues, and others occupied by Leyden Manikins tapping vainly on the walls of their transparent prisons. The rusty alchemical furnace that dominated this whole chaotic scene resembled an ironclad warrior standing guard over a battlefield.
Echo didn’t know where to look and what to fear the most when Ghoolion put him down on the floor. He had never seen so many astonishing and menacing objects under one roof. When he caught sight of a stuffed but lifelike Nanofox baring its teeth at him from one of the lower shelves, he arched his back and hissed with his tail fluffed out like a flue brush.
Ghoolion laughed. ‘He can’t hurt you any more,’ he said. ‘I gutted him, rendered him down for his fat, stuffed him with sawdust and wood shavings, and sewed him up again - it took me seven hundred stitches. I had to insert a wire armature in his jaw to reproduce the facial expression. That snarl of yours tells me I made a good job of it.’
Echo shuddered at the thought that the Alchemaster would gut him, extract his fat and stuff him with sawdust when the next full moon came round. He might even wire him up with his tail erect and his back arched in memory of this moment.
‘Now for our contract,’ said Ghoolion, and he withdrew a sheet of parchment covered with alchemistic symbols from a stack of documents. Taking pen and ink, he proceeded to scrawl on the back of it, which was blank. Echo found it far from pleasurable to watch him drawing up the contract. The Alchemaster was muttering to himself with such glee as he wrote, and his eyes were glittering with such undisguised malevolence, that the terms of the contract could hardly be to his, Echo’s, advantage. All he caught were phrases such as ‘irrevocably committed’, ‘indissolubly binding’, ‘legally enforceable’ and the like. In fact, however, he couldn’t have cared less how unreasonable Ghoolion’s terms were - just as long as he got something to eat in the very near future.
‘There,’ Ghoolion said at last. ‘Now sign!’
He held out a red ink pad. Echo applied his paw, first to the pad and then to the foot of the document. Before he could even glance at the wording, Ghoolion snatched the parchment away and stowed it in a drawer.
‘Take a look around,’ he commanded, indicating the room with a dramatic gesture. ‘This is your new home - the last you’ll ever have in your life, so I advise you to savour every moment. Imagine you’re dying, but painlessly, without the disagreeable symptoms of some terrible wasting disease. You can eat what you like while you’re dying. Consider yourself lucky! Very few creatures are granted such a pleasant end. I’ll try to make it as quick and painless as possible when the moment comes. I’m an expert.’ He gazed at his bony hand, which he had raised like an executioner showing his victim the lethal implement. ‘Now let’s start fattening you up right away. We mustn’t waste another moment of your precious time.’
Ghoolion’s heartless words gave Echo the shivers, but he did as he was told and took a look at his new - and very last! - home, trying to control his emotions and fears so as not to expose himself to any more of the Alchemaster’s barbed remarks. He wanted to study every detail of his surroundings because he knew from experience that fear subsides more quickly the more you look your fears in the face.
It struck him, as he surveyed the room, that the shadows on the walls were moving. The bulky shadow of the alchemical furnace, which had loomed over a bookcase a moment earlier, was now slanting across a grey slate covered with mathematical formulae. How could that be? Did the shadows in Ghoolion’s