The Hollow Prince Read online

  “I know, but for sake of the investigation, you went into a Tesco’s.”

  “—I paid a helpful young man five quid to check for me.” Phreniwit twirls the bent end of his mustache up where it stays for a second before beginning a slow reverse curl. “It would appear that we have stumbled upon a very unique bottle.”

  “Well,” Merriweather clears his throat carefully. “Not completely. I’m still trying to get my hands on the case records, but, in the last week, there has been at least two other deaths involving lead poisoning.”

  “The fulminous toad of midnight, Detective Constable. This may be the beginning of an epidemic.”

  *

  Phreniwit thanks the waitress, pressing a ten pound note in her hand. Lifting his full glass, he salutes the young Detective Constable. “Salve, Thomas.” Foam gets caught in his askew mustache as he drinks.

  Merriweather nods, but doesn’t touch his pint glass. “I’m not sure you should still be drinking, sir. We are—well, I am—still on duty. We should be working on the case.”

  “But we are.” Phreniwit wipes at his mouth. “Did your formal education fail to include a course in Latin?”

  “The requirement must have been dropped the year before I entered college, sir.”

  “Not even as an elective credit? A shame. Then you do not know the meaning of the words on the bottle. Nor do you know the significance of the name of this establishment.” He takes another sip from his porter. “Ah, while I heartily acknowledge your efforts in tracking the pervasive creep of our poisonous toad, I am concerned about the manifest failure of your generation to understand the permutations and machinations of the human psyche. The intellectual pursuit of philosophy, the natural craft of the alchemical sciences, the—”

  “Latin,” Merriweather interrupts. “You were going to tell me the significance of the words.”

  “Do you know the second failing of our educational system, Thomas?”

  “That it doesn’t instill patience in its youth?”

  Phreniwit puts a finger to his lips, hiding the arc of a smile. “Not quite. I am referring to the failure of mythology to find its place in this bright and shiny century. Are you a superstitious man, Thomas? Do you believe in fate or the power of faith?”

  Realizing it may be awhile before he hears about the Latin, Merriweather sips from his glass. “My parents took me to Sunday services every week as a child, actually.”

  “While I suppose you are seeking some congratulatory commentary by regaling me with that tidbit from your childhood, it has no bearing on the questions.”

  Merriweather flushes. “I’m a trained police officer. I only believe data that I can empirically record and objectively verify.”

  “Yes, that is exactly the transgression against mythology that is destroying the creative mind.” Phreniwit taps the side of his head. “Faith, my dear doubting Thomas. The world is sustained by faith. It is the viral idea, transmitted by the tongue and the word. It is the pandemic belief that we can be something more than simple sacks of cognitive meat.”

  He wets his lips on his porter. “The Latin phrase ‘solve et coagula’,” he continues, “is an alchemical motto and it references one of the early stages of the Great Work. It is the dissolution and coagulation of the gross material where the impurities are spun off, the metals are leached out.”

  “Like lead.”

  “Like lead.” Phreniwit nods. “This establishment, as you will note from your coaster, is named ‘Aqua Vita.’ It means ‘water of life’ and it is a tincture used by alchemists to wash the purified Saturnine substance until it becomes white. At which time it is ready to be engaged in the chemical marriage that produces the stone of the philosophers.”

  “And what does this have to do with faith?”

  “Faith is how we suspend the rules of the physical universe, Thomas. The alchemists believe their convoluted experiments—the dissolving, the heating, the washing—help them cleanse and purify their own spirits. The creation of gold is not just a physical act, it is primarily a metaphor—a viral agent of language that infects and informs faith.”

  “You think alchemists are involved.” Merriweather looks about the dim pub with sudden alertness. “Like a gangland slaying. The bottle was a message to a rival faction.”

  “Indeed. Though ‘faction’ may be too strong a term. I doubt the gregariousness necessary to sustain such an underground cabal can be found in the personality of an earnest alchemist. They are loners by nature, spiritually introspective. Prone to contemptuousness and jealousy. Rife with arrogance.”

  While Merriweather’s inclination is to think the other man is describing himself, he follows Phreniwit’s nod towards the bar. The barman, a lanky fellow with a shock of unrestrained yellow hair, is scowling at his reflection in the mirror mounted behind the bar as he pours a glass of lager from the tap.

  *

  It is nearly daybreak when the barman returns to his flat. He flicks on the kitchen light, startling Merriweather who, during the last hour, has drifted off. Phreniwit, seemingly none the worse for wear considering his alcoholic consumption of the last day and a half, gives the somewhat surprised barman a wide smile. “Good morning, Nathan.”

  The barman, who hasn’t been called Nathan since his mother died ten years ago, scowls at the intruders. “I’m calling the police,” he says, digging in his pocket for his mobile phone.

  “We are the police.” Merriweather’s proclamation is marred by a huge yawn which overwhelms the last word.

  The barman notices the bottle, the opener, and two glasses sitting on the small table. “What do you want?” When Phreniwit indicates the toad-emblazoned bottle, the barman shakes his head. “I don’t know that brand. Never seen it before.”

  “Then you will, of course, deny the fact that I got it out of your refrigerator.”

  The barman shrugs. “You lot planted them.”

  Phreniwit glances at Merriweather. “It is interesting his choice of words, don’t you think? We are a ‘lot,’ this bottle is an ‘it.’ And yet, Nathan’s phraseology also includes a ‘them,’ which implies a presence of multiple bottles in yonder refrigerator, though I have made no such claim myself. It is a perplexing syntactic quandary to find ourselves in.”

  Merriweather nods sagely as if he, too, is mystified by the pronoun choice.

  The barman closes his mobile and shoves it back in his pocket. “What do you want?” he repeats, his jaws chewing on the words.

  “To talk about alchemy, Nathan, and the nature of the Great Work. To discuss the nature of regular meetings held at Aqua Vita.”

  “I’m just the barman there,” he says, “I don’t know anything about these meetings.”

  “No? Albert Bledsoe knew something about alchemy. We found a rather interesting chemical laboratory in an upstairs room in his house. You have similar equipment in your spare bathroom, in addition to a sheaf of labels that all sport this same black toad. We took the liberty of checking.” Phreniwit looks to his companion. “And the other gentlemen . . .”

  “George Masonwick and Bertand Ullingson.”

  “Yes, do those names ring any bells? And before you protest your innocence, let me inform you that we have already retrieved histories of their credit card transactions. All three men were regulars at Aqua Vita. Every Tuesday night. Such congruity is hard to dismiss. Those men. This night. Week after week.”

  “I got a lot of regulars. It’s a popular joint.”

  “Most assuredly. But not, I think, for the beer.”

  “You think we’ve got a secret alchemy club? What’s illegal about that?” A sardonic grin jerks the corner of the barman’s mouth. “You got nothing but a couple of bottles of beer. So what. Doesn’t prove anything. You don’t even have a warrant which makes this conversation inadmissible.”

  Phreniwit sighs. “That is correct. We have nothing and we can prove nothing.” He picks up the opener from the table and removes the top from the bottle. He carefully pours a meas
ure into each glass. Merriweather notices that the amount is exactly half the available volume. “In the greater cosmological scheme, we are nothing as well. So why don’t we have a drink to celebrate the nothingness of our investigation and we’ll depart in peace.”

  The barman eyes the glass Phreniwit is offering. “After you.”

  “Of course.” Phreniwit lifts the glass to his lips. A cry of surprise slips from Merriweather’s lips as the older man drains the beer in a single long gulp.

  The barman’s grin holds its place for a second and then slips as Phreniwit burps loudly and puts the glass down on the table.

  “Ather—” Phreniwit shakes his head. He reaches into his mouth and plucks something off his tongue. It is a thin film that shines like gold and is ridged and bumped with the impressions of his tongue. “Sorry,” he says, the impediment to his speech removed. “As I was trying to say, after you.”

  The barman stares at the leaf of gold, his gaze fierce and impenetrable. With a silent nod that terminates an internalized conversation, he steps up to the table and grabs the other glass. He throws back his head and downs the dark beer, triumphantly slamming the glass down on the table as he finishes.

  His elation is short-lived. Almost immediately, a grimace of pain wracks his features. Clutching his stomach, he runs to the sink and bends over the steel basin. Merriweather hears the solid clunk of hard matter striking metal as the barman vomits. The barman’s legs tremble and then fail; he falls against the edge of the sink, hangs there for a second, and then is pulled to the floor by gravity. He sprawls, unmoving, his mouth and chin covered with blood and flecks of black spume. His eyes are wide, his expression frozen in disbelief.

  Merriweather gets up from the table and checks the body. Finding no pulse, he leans against the counter, the shock of what he has just witnessed taking hold of his body. Eventually he looks in the sink. Nothing but twisted chunks of dark metal.

  A clink of glassware behind him pulls his attention from the lead in the sink. Phreniwit has poured another half glass. “Have you decided about the nature of the glass?” he asks the young constable. “Half full or half empty?”

  “I think it is simply half.” Merriweather finds his voice. “Full or empty is my subjective impression. Just an expression of my faith.”

  Phreniwit smiles and offers him the beer. Merriweather’s fingers shake only slightly as he lifts the alchemical poison to his lips and drinks. It is spicy—yes, an aftertaste of warm pudding—and warm going down his throat. His tongue tingles as he makes gold.

  THE SURGERY OF SELF

  The trick with psychopharmacological travel is knowing your body's tolerances to the drugs: too little and it's just another long, strange trip; too much and your own psychoses eat your brain, leaving you a drooling idiot. It's just the right touch that separates the visionaries from the addicts. That's what it said on my business card: Harry Potemkin, just the right touch.

  “That's funny,” she said, resting a burnished nail on my business card. “Potemkin, like the facades of false buildings, and yet you insist that you've got what it takes.”

  “Names are albatrosses,” I said, keeping my fingers still. I wanted to peel back her coat and find out if she was neatly packaged on the inside as her arranged features and gold hair suggested.

  She laughed. “I happen to like my name.” I waited. She didn't supply it.

  “Okay,” I said, leaning forward, moving my hands from my stomach to the clean blotter on the desk. “What are you looking for?”

  “I've got a problem. It's my twin sister.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “What's wrong with her?”

  She produced a small leather case from the right-hand pocket of her coat, a slim brown rectangle that, for another type of woman, would have been a cigarette case. She opened it with a practiced one-handed motion and, from a small stack of credit cards, coffee stand punch-cards and ID, drew off a small picture and offered it to me.

  It was water-stained on one edge, the photo paper curling from age and the ancient lick of moisture. It wasn't perfectly rectangular, suggesting someone other than a machine had cut this picture down from a larger portrait. The picture was of two baby girls, both with happy smiles on their faces. “Nice looking kids,” I said. “You the one on the left?” A carefully arranged blanket obscured the strand of flesh and sinew connecting them at the waist.

  She favored me with an older version of that smile, stained with something that might have been sorrow or defeat. “Yes. Good guess.”

  I shrugged. Fifty-fifty shot. Easy odds. No one got hurt and, by being correct, I got points for being charming. That always helped later when we got right down to what I was going to be asked to do.

  “This picture is the only physical record of my sister's existence,” she said. “My father insists that I was an only child. The hospital we—I—was born at was torn down a decade ago to make room for a highway on-ramp and the records are scattered—” She shrugged. “They're gone. It doesn't really matter where. None of my extended family seem to remember a second child and, by the time I entered school, I was the only one.”

  “Mother?” I asked.

  “Complications with the delivery,” she said. “I never had a chance to meet her.”

  “I'm sorry,” I said and meant it. I put the picture down on the blotter, arranged its edge with today's square on the calendar. “This picture is genuine? Not some photographic trickery or computer editing?”

  “It was taken thirty years ago,” she said. “That sort of optical obfuscation was hideously expensive back then and it wasn't the sort of thing...” Her voice trailed off.

  I rested the point of my index finger on the picture, touching the tiny feet of the girl on the left—the younger version of the one sitting on the other side of my desk. “Yeah,” I said, “one doesn't normally fake pictures of conjoined twins just for a lark.”

  She nodded. “They've done a good job with the cosmetic surgery.” She put her hand against her left hip. “You can barely tell. I only know when it gets cold.”

  “And the records are all gone?”

  “Yes, and no one wants to talk about the separation. No one wants to tell me what happened. If she lived or not.”

  “Do you think she's still alive?”

  She shook her head. “Not physically.”

  “Ah,” I said, understanding why she can come to see me. “That's a good trick.”

  “She's haunting me, Mr. Potemkin,” my new client said. “I want you to stop her.”

  *

  I took her in the back room to shoot her up. She resisted at first, unwilling to be drugged by some complete stranger but, after I showed her my degree in hypnotherapy, my state medical license, my federal pharmaceutical license and the pictures of me and the Native American shaman getting ready to share a peyote experience, she relented and let me tie her up and slap a homemade cocktail into her arm.

  She tried to show me how brave she was by fighting the narcotics but the undercurrent of Haloperidol in the mix dragged her down. After a few minutes, her eyes closed and her breathing slowed. She was pretty to start with and only got more luminous as the tension drained out of her body.

  It happens to most of us. Most.

  While I waited for the chemicals to fully active her brain, I went through her pockets: just a set of house keys, a tube of lipstick—Clinique, Wild Berry—and the leather case. The case contained thirty-four dollars in various bills, three credit cards—two VISAs and a department store card—a number of punch-cards from various local establishments—four coffee shops, a video rental store, a burrito shop and a dry cleaner's—several receipts and two pieces of ID. One was her driver's license that gave her name as AnnaBeth Halvorson and her place of residence as somewhere north of 125th, and the second was an ID card for a local chain of 24-hour gyms.

  The other item of interest was one of my business cards, an older style that I had ran out of a year or so ago. I recognized the handwriting on the ba
ck of the card and went out into the main office to make a call.

  “Gloria,” I said when Dr. Matthews' receptionist answered. “It's Potemkin.”

  “Hello, Harry. How are you?”

  I stared at the drawn blinds which insulated me from the city. “Good enough. You?”

  “I'm fine.” Her brittle voice shifted slightly. All business today. No time for idle chatter. Not for me, not anymore. “Dr. Matthews is with a patient right now. Can I take a message for him?”

  I looked down at Gloria's rolling script. “I wanted to talk to you actually.”

  “Really?” She already knew.

  “AnnaBeth Halvorson,” I said. “Is she one of Dr. Matthews' patients?”

  “Ah, Harry, you know I can't tell you about his patients.”

  “Even when you send them to see me?”

  Her voice dropped a few decibels, a conspiratorial whisper that would have been sexy if I had been paying for it. “She's haunted.”

  “By her dead twin sister. So she told me.”

  “Dr. Matthews thinks she's schizophrenic. He wrote a number of prescriptions, but they didn't help. They just made it worse.”

  “What? What did they make worse?”

  “The presence. She got mean.” Gloria paused for a second and I heard the rustle of paperwork on her desk. “She was early to an appointment a few days ago and she didn't want to sit by herself in the waiting room. She came out and talked to me. She needed someone to talk to.”

  “Isn't that why she's paying Dr. Matthews?” I asked not because of propriety but because Gloria was sharing a secret with me. If I didn't feed her the impression that I was slightly outraged by her behavior, I wouldn't serve as Gloria's confessor. She had to tell someone. She needed to explain why she violated her sacred relationship with her boss: he was the one who had the diplomas that said he was qualified to talk about psychology. Gloria was just a secretary and I was just a black market hack: neither of us was qualified in the eyes of the establishment to discuss what made people tick.