The Apothecary Page 0,53

sizes: Some were made of wood and some of white marble, but one bowl looked like black onyx, and one like green jade.

Jin Lo started to move around the lab like a chef moving around her own kitchen, pulling out an enormous copper pot. She emptied the white liquid from a large bottle into it, and a clear liquid from another, and lit a burner underneath.

“You’re not going to put my father in there,” Benjamin said.

“We wait too long,” she said, pouring black seeds into the green jade mortar, “harder to change. You want him like this?” She handed me the mortar and pestle. “Crush,” she said.

“But what if we do something wrong?” Benjamin persisted.

Jin Lo surveyed the shelves again, and slapped Pip’s hand away from a jar that said LICORICE ROOT.

“Just one little bit?” he pleaded.

She ignored him. I started grinding the black seeds with the heavy pestle.

“I need a minute with the beaker,” Benjamin said.

Jin Lo looked at him. “Is salt,” she said.

Benjamin’s jaw was set firmly. “I still do,” he said. “It’s my father.”

Jin Lo sighed at this sentimentality and let him have the beaker. Benjamin held it in both hands and turned away from us. He was telling his father something, but even in the small room, I couldn’t hear the words.

The liquid in the pot had started to boil, and Jin Lo added a dark red powder, and then a yellow paste that she measured in spoonfuls from a jar. She took the mortar and inspected my work, then gave it a few more emphatic grinds with the pestle and poured the powdered seeds in. She stirred the pot, and lifted the wooden spoon experimentally: As it boiled, the solution had started to thicken into a greenish-brown ooze. It glopped off the spoon back into the pot. She leaned over and sniffed it. “Now,” she said to Benjamin.

He looked at the pot. “I can’t,” he said, clutching the beaker.

“Now,” she said. “Will be too late, too thick.”

“Have you done this before?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “I read how.”

“What if you remember wrong?”

Jin Lo shrugged. “Then he stay salt.”

I could feel Benjamin’s fear of letting his father go, and of never being able to get him back. Finally he handed the beaker to Jin Lo and turned away, unable to watch as she dumped his father into the goo.

Pip pulled over a footstool so he could see inside the pot, and I stood on tiptoe. As Jin Lo stirred, the mixture took on a stickier consistency. At first, nothing happened. I realised I wasn’t breathing. I didn’t think Pip was either. I thought of the witches in Macbeth, hunched over the cauldron, waiting for their evil magic to happen. Was it “eye of newt and tongue of frog”? Something like that.

Jin Lo pulled the glop up out of the pot with the spoon, working and stretching it like toffee. Each time she pulled, some of it stayed stretched for a moment. Benjamin couldn’t stand it and turned to look. I thought I saw something like a knee forming as Jin Lo pulled. It held its shape for a second before sinking back into the pot. I blinked, thinking I’d imagined it. Then I was sure I saw part of an arm, before it sank back in.

Then the whole mixture started to boil up over the lip, and the shape of the apothecary’s head emerged and sank down again. Then his head returned with both shoulders. Two sticky hands gripped the sides of the pot and pushed his torso and then his legs up out of the ooze. He stepped onto the counter, towering over us, and Jin Lo handed him a linen towel to cover the nakedness that would be revealed when all the goo dripped off. He wrapped it around his waist automatically, like a man at the beach, and she handed him a second towel to wipe his face and arms. Pip stared with his mouth open. I’m sure I did, too. Jin Lo had reconstituted the apothecary out of a tiny pile of salt, and he was standing there in front of us, whole and alive.

He looked around, dazed, and held out his hands in front of him, staring at them. Then he saw his son looking up at him from below. “Benjamin!” he said.

Pip stepped off his footstool and offered it to the apothecary, who climbed down from the counter. He wiped ooze off his pale chest, and it plopped to the