Chapter 8
Filled with renewed hope, I begin working on the next potion. Only this time, I take care to flip through the pages, trying to find something most suitable for my ailment.
Revelare occultum catches my interest. Compared to the previous potion, this one contains several unsavoury ingredients.
A hangman’s saliva. Ground kidney stones. Fevered breath.
As instructed, I boil the glowing liquid for exactly seven minutes, and when the time has passed, it turns translucent. Interesting.
The ingestion is different than the other. I’m to add one single drop to every orifice with a dragonfly’s wing, and the rest is to be drunk while turning counter-clockwise. I feel silly but follow every direction exactly as written.
I observe my hands carefully.
This one will cure my ailment. Please. Cure me.
Nothing happens. Then, a cramp.
I gasp, holding onto myself, but it passes as quickly as it arrived.
I’m relieved, having feared the worst. Looking for another potion to try, I turn the book’s page—
No. It can’t be.
What little muscle remained covering my phalangeal bones fogs and thins. Nausea grips me, then an icy wave. Sweat appears on my skin, evaporating instantly.
I feel it.
It grows.
It grows.
No. Please, stop.
But it does not listen. It only wants. It only takes.
I hold onto my limbs as if that would stop them from disappearing. But still they vanish.
A loud knock on wood. I jump.
“Sir Balfour, your dinner is served,” Godfrey says through the closed door.
I feel my arms, but cannot see them. Another knock. My pulse accelerates.
“Leave me,” I mumble, holding my hands up. There is nothing. Not even a disturbance of the light.
“Sir, I was told to convey the message that it is your favourite,” he says, louder this time.
“Leave,” I press out.
My breath is too tight. My vision blurs. I open the window, but it doesn’t help.
“Should I bring tea here, sir?”
“Bloody hell, do as you’re told,” I shout.
I hear a quiet gasp followed by the clicking of heels. Shutting the window carelessly, I rush to the bathroom.
In the mirror, a shirt collar wrapped around thin air approaches. Above it is my soiled lab coat. Broad-shouldered, it floats in the middle of the room. I shrug. I turn. Everything moves as I move.
No.
This isn’t real.
I slide my fingers over the mirror. Faint streaks appear on its surface. But no hands are discernible in this room.
The cloth moves, yet my body is not there.
My heart beats. My lungs breathe. But it’s not right.
Too fast. Too hard.
I grip my chest.
If I feel myself, I must exist. Yet my body does not obey me.
It’s all wrong. Too hot, yet too cold.
I slide to the floor. The room spins. I must persist.
Not like this. It can’t end like this.
I try to stand, but my knees refuse to hold me, so I half-crawl to my laboratory to put an end to this.
There must be a cure. There will be a cure.
Apokatastasis apōleian.
This is it!
The ingredients call for ammonia. Had I ordered it?
I look through every bottle, check every label.
No ammonia. This common household item will not stand between me and my cure.
I only had to stand up and go—when my hand touches the knob, I see nothing.
I cannot fetch anything like this. Cannot leave the house like this.
Godfrey could procu—no. The way I treated him was so out of character.
Utterly rude, perhaps even alarming. He’s likely to call a physician or possibly someone worse.
I must find another way.
I pace my room.
Then I remember.
Geneva Tully cut herself a month before. Because of this injury, Godfrey noticed the absence of emergency cases in the house. He remedied this by adding one to every bathroom.
I rush to the cabinet, opening the small metal box with unsteady fingers.
Bandages. Unused, still wrapped in thin paper.
I pull my trench coat out of the wardrobe. The gloves I used earlier are still strewn on the bed’s edge. After dressing myself quickly, I wrap my head with the bandages, adding sunglasses and a hat.
I check the mirror to make sure I’m presentable enough. I look like I just returned from the front. It didn’t matter now; accidents happen every day.
I rush down the stairs, leaving the house swiftly, hoping I’ll elude Godfrey when I return too.
The streets outside my home are filled with the after-work crowd, but even wrapped like this, the pedestrians pay me no heed.
As harrowing as the war was, it made injured, disfigured, and bandaged men a common occurrence. I could never have foreseen that one day this would come to my advantage. Only a little child points to me and cries, its mother hushing it to silence.
Soon, I reach the chemist, and with the ammonia procured, I return home quickly.
With Godfrey nowhere in sight, I rush to my study.
This will work, I mumble to myself while preparing the potion in a frenzy. I try to concentrate and pay attention to the instructions, but what I saw in the mirror keeps burrowing itself to the front of my mind.
The empty collar, the levitating clothes.
I close my eyes, then force down the tincture. It burns, and then, there is only agony.
Lighting splits my mind. My legs falter. Trying to catch myself, I grip nothing but air. The desk and then—
Bottles shatter around me like the crown of a sacrilegious saint. Shards of glass pierce my skin. The pain is unbearable. Not from the glass but from the inside.
Blackness encroaches. I’m overflowing. It coats my skin.
Too full. Too full.
Writhing on the floor, I hear a choked-off scream. Mine?
Fluid drips from my orifices.
The stabbing of a thousand knives. The twisting of organs.
I’m too heavy. Too dry.
Electrified like caged eels. No, mummified alive.
My muscles twitch. On fire. Numb.
I’m not in control.
I force my eyes open. The cream-coloured ceiling wavers and blurs with each spasm. My throat constricts, and I desperately gasp for oxygen. A bird flaps its wings on the windowsill. My vision darkens, my ears ring, and I know no more.