The Alchemist

Ben took a deep breath and stepped through the fireplace into the darkness. He flashed his torch around him and blinked at what he saw.

He was in a narrow room, some six metres long and three deep. At one end sat a large old oak table, covered in a thin layer of dust. On it rested a heavy metal chalice, like a huge wine goblet studded around the edge with iron rivets. Lying in the goblet, staring up with empty eyes, was a human skull. On either side of this grim ornament sat two iron candlesticks, two feet high with broad round bases and each holding a thick church candle.

His torch was dimming; he reached into his pocket for his lighter and lit the candles. He picked up one of the heavy candlesticks, and the flickering light threw shadow around the room. The toothless skull leered at him. Around the walls were dusty shelves lined with books. He picked one up and blew the dust and cobwebs off it. Holding the candle close he read the old gilt script on the leather cover-Necronomicon. The Book of the Dead. He replaced it and picked up another leather-clad book. De Occulta Philosophia. Secrets of Occult Philosophy.

It looked as though he was in someone’s private study, long since abandoned. He put the books back carefully on the dusty shelf and swept the heavy candlestick around him. The walls of the room were painted with murals depicting alchemical processes. He walked up close and studied one that showed a hand emerging from a cloud. The Hand of God? From the hand, water was dripping into a strange vessel that was being held up by little winged nymphs. From an opening at the bottom of the vessel there flowed an ethereal, misty substance scattered with alchemical symbols and the label Elixir Vitae.

He turned away and raised the candle to illuminate other corners of the room. Above the entrance he’d come through, a face looked down on him. It was an oil portrait in a broad gilt frame. The face belonged to a heavily built man with a grizzled beard and a thick mane of silvery hair. Looking out from under the bushy grey eyebrows, his eyes seemed to twinkle with a sense of humour that belied his stern expression. A gold plaque below the portrait read in stark gothic letters:

FULCANELLI

‘So we meet at last,’ Ben murmured. He moved away from the portrait and walked around the edges of the room, looking down at the floor. The stone tiles were partly covered by a dusty old rug. Beyond the edges of the rug he could see the outer parts of a mosaic pattern on the floor. He knelt and set the candlestick down with a metallic clunk. Clouds of dust floated up in the wavering light. He lifted the edge of the rug, and a large spider scuttled out and disappeared into the shadows. He rolled the rug up into a long tube and pushed it against the wall. He blew the dust away, revealing the coloured stone mosaic set into the flagstones. After a minute or two of brushing and blowing he stepped back to look at it.

The pattern was about fifteen feet long and took up the whole width of the study. Here they were again, the twin star-circles. At the exact centre of the design was a circular flagstone with an iron ring inset flush with the floor. He grasped the ring with both hands and pulled hard. There was a rush of escaping cold air from below.

He shone his torch down into the hole. The fading beam lit up a spiral stairway carved into solid rock, descending into blackness.

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The long descending stone spiral carried him down into solid rock. As he corkscrewed deeper and deeper into the vertical tunnel, the sound of the storm outside faded away to nothing.

After a while, the staircase ended and met a level passageway that snaked off into the dark. There was only one way to go, and the only sound was his echoing footsteps and the drip of water. The smooth rounded walls of the tunnel were high enough for him to walk upright. It must have taken centuries to dig this out of the mountain terrain. A rough tunnel would have done just as well, yet whoever had created this had been interested in far more than utility. They were chasing perfection. But why? Where was the tunnel leading? He walked on.

Without warning, the tunnel snaked around a sharp bend and for a moment he thought he’d come to a dead end. But then he felt something stirring his hair. A cool breeze, coming from above. He raised the torch. There was a passage to the left, more steps leading upwards. He climbed on and on. It seemed to him that he was going up much further than he’d come down. That could mean only one thing-that he was now climbing up above ground level. He remembered the cliff next to the house, and realized that he must be inside the mountain. Deep inside it, surrounded on all sides by thousands of tons of solid rock.

His torch was getting dimmer. When it faded away to yellow and then to nothing, he stuffed it in his pocket and used his Zippo lighter to see by. It was getting colder, and wind was whistling around him even though the walls of the stairwell were close and tight. His fingers were burning as the metal of the lighter heated up, and he was worried about the flammable fuel inside igniting if it overheated too much. Suddenly his foot missed a step in the darkness, and he slipped and almost fell. He paused for a moment, his heart pounding. He let the scalding hot lighter cool down for a while, then relit it and climbed on.

The stairway soon ended and Ben found himself in a chamber. He clambered to his feet. Holding up his lighter, he blinked in amazement. The chamber seemed to stretch out far and wide on all sides. He came to a stone pillar that seemed to grow out of the floor, all the way to the vaulted archways of the ceiling some six feet above his head. The pillar had been laboriously smoothed and carved, covered in intricate designs depicting religious scenes and icons. A few feet away from it was another similar pillar, and then another.

He swept the lighter-flame around him. Rows of golden crucifixes glinted in the flickering light. A huge altar stood in front of him, sculpted from solid stone and heavily adorned with gold.

He was in a church. A medieval Gothic church carved out inside a mountain.

Ben lit the altar candles. There were scores of them, all held by massive solid gold candlesticks. One candle at a time, the church gradually filled with amber light. He gasped at the size of the carved-out space. The wealth of it was staggering.

Then he saw the stone chests that lined the walls. There were dozens of them, knee high and a metre square. He moved closer. They were filled to the brim with gold. He sifted through one, his fingers raking through solid gold coins and nuggets, rings and amulets. There was enough gold in the church to make its finder the richest man in the world.

Carrying a heavy candlestick to see by, he went over to the towering altar. Carved in smooth stone, two white lions converging into a single head supported a circular stone basin that was some eight feet in diameter. Candlelight glimmered off the dark water inside. Around its smooth edge, carved in flowing letters, were the words:

Omnis qui bibit hanc aquam, Si fidem addit, Salvus erit

He who drinks this water shall find salvation, if he believes

At the feet of an angelic statue was a gold pedestal, and on it rested a long leather tube. Inside it he found a scroll. He delicately unfurled the cracked, archaic document on the floor and knelt down to study it. It was obviously medieval, though fabulously well-preserved. The writings on it were in a strange form of Latin that he couldn’t understand, mixed with what looked like Egyptian hieroglyphics.

He blinked as the truth dawned. So was this the legendary manuscript that everyone had been looking for? It was clear now that the papers Rheinfeld had stolen from Clement, the copy he’d made in the notebook, had never been more than Fulcanelli’s own notes. They were the alchemist’s record of the clues that had led him to find the manuscript itself. The same clues that would guide the next seeker who followed in his steps.

Now, faced with it at last, he understood the power of this mysterious document and the terrible hold it had had over so many people. There was no telling how much blood had been spilled on its account through the ages, either to protect it or to acquire it. It had the power to inspire evil. Did it also have the power to do good?

Something else had fallen out of the leather tube. It was a folded sheet of paper. Ben opened it. It was a letter, and he’d seen that handwriting before.

To the Seeker:

My Dear Friend,