I looked at my notebook, the one I’d kept when I’d had the spirit butterflies upon me and was reading like a madman. I scarcely recognized my scribbling now. There were some passages I was simply unable to read, and those I could read didn’t make a jot of sense to me. There seemed to be information not just about turning lead to gold, but about many other things too, including the mysteries of the human body. Numbers and notations and equations that might as well have been the hieroglyphs of a lost civilization.
Nothing good had come out of the spirit world with me. Nothing.
It was just gibberish all along, a mockery of knowledge spun like a cocoon about me by those butterflies.
I ripped out the pages from the notebook and held them close to the candle flame.
And yet I couldn’t burn them.
What if the knowledge was real but I wasn’t clever enough yet to understand it?
Quietly, as though I were keeping a secret from myself, I folded the pages and locked them away in my drawer.
Later.
That evening came on stormy, and Henry, Elizabeth, and I stood under the awning of the great balcony and looked over the rain-pelted lake. Mist obscured the mountains, and I couldn’t help wondering if Konrad were somehow in it.
“Can I ask you a question?” I said to Henry. “Your talisman. You never did tell us what it was.”
“Oh,” he said, a little sheepishly. “It was just some inspiring words. I don’t mind showing you now.”
He reached into his pocket and drew out the bit of paper for me.
I unfolded it and read, “‘I will drink life to the lees/ To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield.’ You wrote these?”
He nodded.
“They’re very fine,” said Elizabeth.
“It suits you well,” I said.
“We’ll miss you on your journey,” Elizabeth told him.
“And I’ll miss you on yours,” he replied. “I wish my father and I were going to Italy and not Holland. I’ve heard the winters can be quite dismal.”
“I wish you were coming with us,” she said.
He blushed. “Do you?”
“Of course she does,” I said, wondering if he still harbored ambitions to win her heart. And then I added, “You’re practically a brother to her.”
I clapped him on the shoulder, and he looked at me wryly. Then we both smiled, as two friends do before a fencing match.
The rain came harder, pockmarking the lake. The wind picked up, and I felt the great cool drops against my skin. Light flickered behind the clouds.
“You should come in now,” Father said, joining us on the balcony. “You’ll be soaked in a minute.”
“That lightning,” I asked him, “what form of matter is it?”
“Electricity,” he said. “A discharge of energy between oppositely charged particles. It’s a relatively new science, a potent and promising one.”
A great fork suddenly impaled the lake. From the sky came a deafening crack, like someone taking a chisel to the very heavens. There was another flash, and about fifty yards along our shoreline a massive oak erupted in a stream of blinding fire. When the light vanished, the tree was nothing more than a blasted stump.
“Come inside, Victor,” Elizabeth said from the doorway, and held out her hand to me. But I hesitated.
“Yes,” I said, “in just a moment.” And I turned back to the storm and thought: Such astonishing power.
