What is remarkable is that I have daily come to regret more and more that my faithful assistant Gardner has left me, now that this vagrant Kelley is in my house and by me all the time and at every meal does slobber and belch like a pig. I would dearly love to ask honest Gardner what he thinks of this intruder and whether he might after all be an unknowing instrument of Bartlett Greene! Can it be that the loot from the desecrated grave of the Saint has returned to me like a bad penny? Was the one who first brought them not the uncanny Mascee, the accomplice of Bartlett Greene, that mysterious intermediary of fate?
But these misgivings slowly pass, like my long, dreary days. I see everything in a much calmer light: neither Mascee nor Kelley are emissaries of Greene, but both are blind instruments of a benevolent Providence and, despite the traps and pitfalls of the Evil One, will help me to my due salvation.
How otherwise could it have been possible for things that had belonged to a Saint to fall into the hands of a degenerate! Can ought ill reside in such objects? Can the Holy Bishop’s curse be a threat from the world beyond to me, a humble and zealous student of the divine mysteries and a servant devoted to their fulfilment? No; I have atoned for the sins of my arrogant youth and my body bears the marks of my past foolishness. All is expiated, and today I am no longer an unworthy recipient of gifts from Beyond, as I was when the “Tutor to the Czar” offered me these mysteries for the first time and I toyed with them and marked them and threw them out of the window – so that thirty years later I should recognise them and receive them again with a more serious, truly prepared mind.
My trusty Gardner was certainly right to warn me not to turn to an alchymy that was devoted to the worldly transmutation of metals. To achieve that, beings from a dark, invisible world must be called down to meddle in ours – black magic, magic of the left hand Gardner would have said; that is my belief, too, but what has it to do with me? I do not take part in it and do not strive for gold, but for Life Eternal!
That spirits are involved, I will not deny: since the day Kelley entered my household there have been strange, unexplained signs of their presence: repeated knocking, a dry sound that dies away quickly, as if someone were stabbing a pair of compasses into wood, a crackling and rustling noise in walls and cupboards, in tables and other pieces of furniture; also the steps of invisible messengers coming and going, and sighing and breathless whispering that suddenly stops when one listens – and at the second hour of the night it is often accompanied by drawn out chords, as if the wind were blowing through taut strings. Often in the middle of the night I have raised my head and beseeched the invisible being in the name of God and the Holy Trinity to stand and speak and tell me why it had been aroused from the peace of the grave or sent to us from the world beyond, what its mission was and who had charged it to visit me, but until this day I have had no answer. Kelley is of the opinion that it is connected with St. Dunstan’s book and spheres: the spirits, so he maintains, desire to preserve what is left of their mysteries; but he, so he boasts, will tear them from them. And he confessed that he had been plagued by such voices and noises since the very day he had procured the objects.
At this revelation I was mightily troubled, for again it made me think that the old secret agent and whoremaster, from whom Kelley had procured them, had perhaps after all been murdered for the possession of the book and spheres. And once more words spoken by my trusty Gardner came into my mind: it were, he said, a vain and dangerous enterprise to create the philosopher’s stone by chymical means, if the arcane process of spiritual rebirth had not previously been completed, of which the Bible told, though in veiled words. First, he had warned, I should discover this process and undertake it, otherwise I would fall from one trap into another and from one sorrow into another, as if I were guided by a will-o’-the-wisp.
To calm my unease I called Kelley to me and asked him
