The Alchemist's Door Read online

  The innkeeper, a widow, led them upstairs to a group of clean, freshly-aired rooms. Jane unpacked a bit and sat down, looking with satisfaction at the plump featherbeds. But Dee’s fears had not left him, not even here. They should be moving, he thought, hurrying without ceasing until they reached their destination.

  They went downstairs to a supper of very good fish pie cooked with ginger, pepper, and cinnamon. “May I speak with you?” Kelley whispered to him.

  “Certainly,” Dee said.

  “I’m sorry I was so angry earlier,” he said. He was always penitent after an argument; it was as if two angels struggled for his soul, one good and one evil. “I will look in the glass again for you. Tonight might be an auspicious time.”

  They might be able to risk it, Dee thought. He could not imagine a demon haunting them here, in this place that seemed so ordinary, so good. Perhaps if Kelley was truly repentant the good angels would return. And Laski would expect them to resume the experiments sometime; if they started tonight, with Laski gone, at least the prince would not be there if they failed.

  They went up to their rooms after supper, and he saw Jane and the children to bed. Then he took out the red silk cloth embroidered with powerful signs—the Seal of Solomon, the names of angels, some of the hidden names of God—and spread it on the table. On top of that he set the wax tablet, inscribed with stars and pentagrams and the symbols of the planets, and the stand for the showstone. He moved carefully, aware that one misstep might bring disaster on them all.

  Finally he reached into the gray velvet bag for the showstone, a perfect sphere of transparent crystal about the size of a baby’s head. He peered into the glass, still hoping after all this time to see something. There was only his reflection, upside-down, as though he had drowned. He looked older than he remembered, older than he felt. Others had found wisdom in his long face, his piercing eyes, and Jane, he knew, thought him handsome. But he saw only the harsh lines scouring his cheeks and forehead, saw that his beard and his neat cap of hair had become almost completely white. He set the ball carefully on its stand.

  The two men prayed, and then Kelley bent over the glass. “I see—it is Madimi who comes to me,” he said. The child-angel Madimi was one of their most frequent visitors. “She says—she is dancing now, she is very pleased with something.”

  Kelley raised his head. “Look,” he said, pointing to one of the chairs. Dee looked, though he knew he would see nothing. “There she is, dancing on the back of the chair. She is wearing a gown of changeable silk, red and green.”

  Dee wondered for perhaps the hundredth time what it would be like to see angels everywhere. If it was true that everything in the world had its own angel—every person and clock and book and stone—then whatever you looked at would be incredibly alive, a constant shift and play of colors and motion. And he wondered again why this sight had been given to Kelley and not to him.

  Kelley stopped. The silence in the room grew. Something moved in a dark corner. It is the fire, Dee thought. The fire is making the shadows dance.

  There is no fire.

  His heart kicked at his ribs. He looked quickly at Kelley. Kelley was bent over the crystal once more; he had noticed nothing. Because there is nothing to notice, Dee thought. It is your imagination, it is nothing … .

  Suddenly he realized how cold he was, how the cold permeated every part of him. A powerful shiver shook him like a seizure. “What—what do you see for me?” he asked, breaking the silence.

  “I see eleven noblemen in rich sable,” Kelley said. “One man wears a sable cap and sits on a chair inlaid with precious stones. ‘Pluck up your heart,’ he says to you. ‘You will become rich, and you will be able to enrich kings and help those who are needy. Were you not born to use the commodities of this world? Were not all things made for man’s use?’”

  Dee forced himself to relax. Most of the angels Kelley summoned spoke in convoluted metaphors and parables; this one was far more forthcoming. And he would not mind being wealthy, not for Kelley’s reasons but because, with enough money, he would finally be free to pursue his studies without worry.

  “What about Laski?” Dee asked. “What do you see for him?”

  “He will become king. He will triumph over the Turks. His name will be spoken in every capital in Europe.”

  Suddenly one of the shadows seemed to detach itself from the rest. A change came over Kelley. He laughed harshly. “All gone,” he said. “All gone. No hope.”

  Dee clutched one hand tightly with the other, only dimly aware that he was hurting himself. “What is gone?”

  “Castles, swords, kingdoms, crowns,” Kelley said. “His name will be spoken in every capital in Europe.”

  “I—I don’t understand.”

  “All gone. Your books. Your library. What you value most in this world.”

  “What happened to my books?”

  Kelley laughed gleefully. “Fire, flood, destruction,” he said. “Your library is gone.”

  “Master Kelley!” Dee said desperately. “Master Kelley, stop! Look at me.”

  “The queen is your enemy,” Kelley said. “In England they condemn your doings and say you are a renegade because you left without the queen’s permission. They say you despise your prince.”

  “Edward Kelley!”

  Kelley looked up from the glass, his face showing confusion. “All gone,” he said softly.

  Dee felt hopeless, defeated even before he began. Dread weakened him like an illness. Something was about to go terribly wrong, some force was building that would destroy him and his family as easily as he crushed an insect, and he was powerless to stop it. Worse—it had already happened, had already been set in motion, like a wave building out in the sea. He would find out what it was only when it came to shore, and by then it would be too late. By then his ill fortune would have overtaken him.

  He roused himself to glance at Kelley. The other man’s face looked normal enough, and his voice had not changed; he had not been taken over by the demon this time. Perhaps it was not here. Perhaps they had outrun it. But what if they hadn’t?

  “Master Kelley,” he said. “What did you mean? Do you remember what you said?”

  The confusion cleared slowly from Kelley’s face. “Yes,” he said. He shook himself, like a dog coming out of the water. “It was—it was a small foolish devil, nothing more.”

  Dee spent the night in the bedroom, praying and pacing, sometimes both at once. Jane slept, her face clear and untroubled. Once in a while he stopped to look at her, as if to remind himself that innocence still existed in the world.

  His conflicting thoughts whirled like a maelstrom. If Kelley had called up the demon then they should flee now, hurry on and hope it would not follow. But this spirit had harmed no one; it was probably not the demon. But it had taunted him maliciously. Would an angel do that? But what if they were not taunts? What if the angel was telling the truth? But if it was telling the truth that meant that his library had been destroyed.

  In the end it was the fact that Kelley’s voice had not changed that decided him. Kelley had not been able to summon the good angels, he thought, but this one had not been the demon he feared. “A very foolish devil,” Dee wrote with relief in his book. Still, he began to record the angels’ speech in Greek to hide their conversations from the malign spirit, though he knew it for a vain hope even as he did it. Angels spoke all the tongues of the world.

  They pushed on, slowed by snow and ice. On Christmas morning they came to Stettin. Dee was never more desirous of going to church, but he saw only a Catholic cathedral, its stained-glass windows lit like a vision from another world.

  He thought long and hard about worshiping there: in England he would be arrested as a heretic if he were found at a Catholic service. But it hadn’t been so long ago that Queen Mary had enforced the Catholic religion, and then everyone had gone to a cathedral like this one. All worship was the same thing, really, he thought suddenly, and then understood to his surprise
that he had always thought so, and that it was only away from England that such a foreign idea could become clear.

  He led his family into the cathedral. The old sonorous Latin phrases sounded like a secret language from his childhood, familiar and mysterious at the same time.

  Laski and his retinue rejoined them at the beginning of January. Heavy snowfall turned the road as white as unmarked paper, and the trees to either side were sere and bare; their branches knocked boldly against the coach like spirits seeking entrance.

  On February third Laski, who was riding on horseback next to Dee’s coach, suddenly called out. “There it is,” he said. “That is my tower, over there. My tower, from my castle.”

  Dee looked out the window, hardly daring to believe it. They had reached their goal, the prince’s estate at Lask.

  He had hoped that Laski would give them rooms on the estate, but instead the prince directed them to lodgings in town. His first sight of the estate was a confusion of outbuildings and people and a great castle on a hill, all of it covered in a fresh dusting of snow.

  A soft dusk had fallen by the time they got to their inn, but enough light remained for Dee to see that it stood near a church. He took that as a good omen. He gave orders for the baggage, helped Jane prepare the children for sleep, and then collapsed on one of the beds with weariness. Safe, he thought as his dreams began to gather around him. We’ll be safe here.

  As time passed the feeling of safety grew, and over the next few days he began to allow himself to remember that terrible evening, the memories he had forced away for so long. The afternoon session had gone well that day, and Dee, excited by the progress he and Kelley had made, had urged Kelley back upstairs to his study after supper.

  He had built up the fire against the chill September air. The cloth, the wax tablet, the showstone, all had been set out that afternoon, and they needed only to pray before beginning. Kelley bent his head over the glass.

  “The angel Madimi comes to me,” Kelley said. “She is dancing in her frock of changeable colors.”

  “Why has she come?” Dee asked.

  “She wants to see you.”

  “And I want to see her.” Suddenly Dee felt all his loneliness and frustration and desire, and he asked, “Why can’t I? Will I ever be able to?”

  “She says, ‘Your sight is more perfect than his,’” Kelley said.

  “More perfect than whose?”

  “Mine. She is pointing toward me.”

  Dee’s heart leapt. “But when will I be able to see her?” he asked again.

  Kelley ignored him. “Will you, Madimi, lend me a hundred pounds for a fortnight?” he asked.

  “Master Kelley!” Dee said, horrified. “You cannot ask the spirits for money. God will give us what is necessary.”

  Kelley fell silent. “Go on, man,” Dee said. “What does she say? What do you see?”

  “Nothing. I see nothing.”

  Dee sighed. Kelley frequently stopped in the middle of his visions, out of weariness or frustration or just sheer stubbornness. “Ask her when I can see her,” Dee urged. “Please.”

  Kelley hesitated a moment and then said, “I know a spell … .”

  “What?”

  “Remember I told you I found an old alchemical manuscript buried in Glastonbury? It contains a spell for summoning angels.”

  “And this spell—will it allow me to see them?”

  In response Kelley began to recite: a gibberish of English and Latin and nonsense syllables. Suddenly the table shook violently. The showstone jerked and rolled toward the edge; Dee made a grab for it and by a miracle managed to catch it before it smashed to the ground.

  A smell filled the room, something unpleasant, like a noxious chemical. A loud babel of voices spoke, then stopped, then spoke again.

  Then suddenly the room was silent, the table steady. Was it over? “Can I see angels now?” Dee whispered.

  “Hush!” Kelley said. “What is the price for knowledge?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What is the price for knowledge?” Kelley said again, much louder this time. “How much will you pay? Anything?”

  Was this part of Kelley’s ritual? Would he pay anything? To know, to finally see the angels … .

  Another part of his mind told him to stop, to say nothing. There was something wrong with Kelley’s question, something he would understand if only he had time to think … . But Kelley importuned him again. “What price?”

  “Anything,” Dee said quickly, before he could change his mind.

  “Good,” Kelley said. “The angel comes to me. You will see him soon.”

  Kelley’s voice changed, grew deeper. That had never happened before. “It is all useless,” he said. “Hopeless. Nothing you do can make any difference. You cannot protect them.”

  “Protect whom?”

  “Anyone. Anyone you love.”

  “Master Kelley!”

  The door to the study opened, and his two-year-old daughter Katherine came in. She took small uncertain steps to the middle of the room. “Katherine, please,” Dee said. “You must—”

  He never finished. The voice, whatever it was, left Kelley and entered Katherine. She began to laugh, in the same deep tones Kelley had used. It sounded terrible, coming from a child. “You cannot protect, for example, your daughter,” she said.

  As Dee watched, terrified, she tottered toward the window. She slammed her tiny hands against the glass, over and over, until the window shattered outward. She grasped the windowsill and pulled herself upward, ignoring the shards of glass lacerating her palms.

  She was going to jump. They were three floors from the ground. Dee cried out and leapt toward her. “You cannot stop me,” Katherine said in the horrible voice. “I will kill your daughter. I cannot be stopped. You can only run away.”

  He grabbed her by her middle and pulled her back. She laughed again, but now Dee noticed that there was a look of torment on her face, as though she were trying to escape whatever had hold of her. He held her tightly. She slumped in his arms and her eyes closed.

  “Katherine,” he said. “Katherine, are you all right?”

  She opened her eyes and began to cry. Was she still possessed? Her cries, at least, sounded normal. What had that—that thing—been? Not an angel, that much was certain. A demon.

  He tried not to shudder, tried not to tear himself away from her. She cried out something in the baby-talk that he could not understand, though Jane could, and he relaxed a little.

  In the days that followed, though, he began to think that the demon was still with them. Sometimes he smelled its foul odor, or saw something move out of the corner of his eye. Objects fell to the floor with no one near them, and once, terrifyingly, a pewter mug flew across the room and hit the opposite wall.

  After a while he realized that these things only happened when Katherine was present. Sometimes she would jump at the loud noises, or burst into tears, but at other times she did not seem to notice the confusion around her. Dee did not know which would be worse, to know that a demon stalked you or to be taken over by it unaware.

  He reread his diary and discovered to his horror a passage he had forgotten, from his very first session with Kelley on March 10, 1582. The angel Uriel had warned him of an evil spirit who, he said, “haunts your house, and seeks the destruction of your daughter.” They must exorcize him with brimstone, Uriel said; Dee could not remember if he had done so or not.

  Now he filled the house with the dreadful smell. He read books, consulted friends, recited incantations. He brought all his knowledge, all his reading, to bear. Nothing he did helped. He asked Kelley, many times, what he thought had happened in the study, but the other man claimed to know no more than he did.

  Then one morning he saw Katherine wander through the house, muttering in an impossibly deep voice. He took her by the arm and shook her. She turned to him, empty-eyed; he had the idea he could see her soul guttering out. “It is over,” she said in that eeri
e voice. “All gone. All gone wrong.”

  Almost without thinking he had left the house, saddled his horse and ridden as fast as he could toward Prince Laski’s lodgings. He would not stand by, powerless, and watch his daughter tormented. The demon had said that they could run away, and finally he realized that that was the only choice left to him.

  Prince Adalbert Laski, a Polish nobleman visiting London, had invited Dee to go to Poland with him. Dee had never even considered the offer; he was happy in England, reading his books and doing his experiments. But when he reached the prince’s lodgings he blurted out his acceptance, seizing on it as a sinner takes a holy relic.

  Now, in Poland, he and Kelley rode out to Laski’s estate a good deal, their horses moving stolidly through the flurries of snow. Dee’s first, hurried glimpse had not told the whole story; several of the outbuildings stood abandoned and one entire wing of the castle had been closed off and allowed to fall into ruin. There were few servants, and several times Laski had to wander through his hallways, calling out, before he found someone to serve them supper or build up the fire.

  But the prince had enough money to agree to become Dee’s patron. “Thank God,” Jane said when Dee told her the news. She had not complained, but Dee knew that she had been worried at how quickly their money disappeared on the journey.

  A month later the angels were still telling Laski that he would be king, but there was no further news for him. The prince grew impatient, even angry, and once or twice he shouted at Kelley when the angels refused to tell them anything more. By this time Dee had discovered he needed certain books for his research, and he decided to move on to Cracow with his family and consult the university there. At the back of his mind was the slightly unworthy thought that in Cracow he and Kelley would not have to see Laski as often.

  Cracow was a jumble of buildings old and new: Gothic churches, sculptured Italian facades, the university, a fortress. Dee barely saw the city, barely ventured outside the house they had rented, not even to go to the university as he had planned. For once Kelley was in a good humor, and Dee hastened to take advantage of it, spending hours closeted with the other man, both of them bent over the showstone.