The Black Alchemist: A Terrifying True Story by Andrew Collins

Author:Andrew Collins [Collins, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780955838606
Google: QLk7rgEACAAJ
Amazon: 0955838606
Publisher: ABC Books
Published: 2014-12-30T07:00:00+00:00

Part Three Red

24 Night of the She-Wolf

Thursday, 15th October, 1987. 8.00 pm. ‘Tonight, I want you all to imagine yourselves as a tree, with your body as the trunk and your arms as branches,’ the vivacious lady teacher told the small, but attentive class. ‘Sense the wind blowing through its leaves. See it. Feel it. Experience it. Then write and draw whatever comes into your mind. I’ll give you ten minutes.’

The class quietly opened their loose-leafed files and picked up pens and pencils in anticipation.

Chesca Potter was first and foremost an artist—a painter of magical and mystical themes and subjects. Indeed, success and recognition had come to her in recent years in the form of several commissions for book covers and illustrations. However, the creative writing class, held close to her King’s Cross flat in the heart of London, was helping to develop her writing skills, and she enjoyed the company of the other young writers.

Content, Chesca picked up a pencil and mentally contemplated the evening’s chosen image, which she found comparatively easy to draw as many of her pictures were created in a similar way.

For a few moments she closed her eyes and became at one with her drawing, before writing: “I am the lightning blasted tree”. Yet she had to stop and re-open her eyes as the image seriously disturbed her for some reason. A nauseous feeling welled up inside her, and she shivered with concern.

Chesca looked around at her classmates silently engrossed in their own work and could not understand her irrational feelings. Why should visualising yourself as a tree produce such an oppressive reaction? Something was undoubtedly wrong, and it worried her.

Friday, 16th October. 3.00 am. Chesca had been unable to get to sleep. The disturbing feelings she had experienced whilst at the writing class the previous evening had grown with intensity as the night had advanced, and with them had come a sense of depression and hopelessness. Why, she could not say. It concerned her almost to the point of desperation, and the incessant gale-force winds had not helped calm her nerves. They had started around eleven o’clock and had been growing in ferocity ever since.

She was on edge, and something else was happening now. An ugly image kept looming out of the dark depths of her mind—a hideous demon with a long tongue protruding from an open mouth. Chesca recognised its form from her past studies of Hindu mythology. It was Kali, an Indian goddess of death and destruction, whose image she had wanted to paint for some while.

Chesca could almost sense the goddess’s terrifying presence getting stronger by the minute. Yet there was more—a sudden realisation that this image was connected in some way with her experience at the writing class and, for some reason, the growing intensity of the gale-force winds.

Something was building up both within her, and outside, across London.

Distraught, she searched for answers. The response came as a sudden compulsion to paint a picture of the demoness—almost as if Kali was compelling her to do so.

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