The Black Charade by John Burke

Author:John Burke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: horror, dark fantasy, Victorian horror, possession, immortality
ISBN: 9781434447258
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2013-01-31T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

Talk of séances and spiritualism had been bad enough. The idea of alchemy was altogether too much. Joseph Hinde watched a leisurely curl of blue smoke from one of Caspian’s best Havanas without any of the appreciation the cigar deserved. His tightening lips looked ready to bite the end off it.

‘First the evil eye, then mesmerism, and now we’re round a charlatan’s fire brewing up gold. Is there no end to this abracadabra?’

Bronwen poured tea. Laura and Elizabeth had resumed their places on the window stool. Stirring the tea in their cups, they made a genteel picture against which that of ancient wizards churning macabre mixtures in cauldrons did indeed seem incongruous.

Caspian said: ‘Let’s forget the abracadabra. Alchemy always aspired to be more than that: far, far more than a greed for wealth. The alchemists sought first to refine their own consciousness; and on the way found parallels in the physical world. The base metals they brought together for conversion into gold represented, first and foremost, the elements and energies of human nature: the gold symbolizes the attainment of spiritual knowledge and the purity of true immortality.’

‘I consulted you, Doctor, in the hope of your knocking some of the nonsense out of my daughter’s head. I didn’t realize you accepted a good half of that nonsense yourself.’

‘It’s hard to find an effective way of defeating an enemy if you don’t first accept that enemy’s existence.’

‘These discredited heresies—’

‘For good or ill, many of your so-called heresies were active before the orthodoxies. Our present religions and sciences haven’t succeeded in ousting them.’

Bronwen knew with chilling certainty that, whatever meticulously rational analyses he might still attempt, Caspian had committed himself now. They were not dealing with one imbalanced girl’s foibles or even with the dabblings of a group of mere eccentrics. In the way he spoke to Hinde he had made it clear that he acknowledged the existence of a real opponent. Fashioned out of what ill-will and ancient greed? Some short-lived by-blow of evil; or something from those deep swamps where, interminable fathoms below all material evidence, timeless mysteries slept in timeless sloughs until some sudden appetite drove them upwards to take on new skins and shapes and malevolent powers.

Hinde had not been tried in such terrors as Bronwen and Caspian had known, and she would not have wished to subject any fellow human being to the ordeal. But to those unscathed it was hard to explain the thousand and one complexities of worlds interwoven with our own.

‘Alchemist and adept,’ Caspian went on, ‘worked to the same principle. Solve et coagula: dissolve and combine. Base metal must be “killed” by stripping away all its false characteristics. With the dross eliminated, the true metal could shine through to a new life and be imbued with more desirable characteristics. So with the spirit of man: the killing of the metal represents the ritual death of initiation into the great Mysteries and emergence into new life.’

‘You can’t believe that in our modem society—‘

‘It’s not what I believe, but what the practitioners believe.

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