The Quack in the Woods

Five years. Compared to the likes one or two years, five seemed too far and distant to spend away from the first home I was ever graced with, and not only had I refused the pleasure of exchanging amicable notes with its proprietor, I had also abandoned the idea of ever visiting in its entirety until I acquired a most sombre of misfortunes. 

It had come quietly, in the metaphorical sense, as no one would dare mistake the blaring horn or clopping hooves of a mail coach heralding the arrival of their delicate cargo. I had not expected to receive anything other than a brief headache from the cacophony, so one might imagine my surprise when I was proffered a note from a Kurt Cameron, a moniker I had sealed away in the iron depths of my mind. 

I allowed the passing years to facilitate much resentment since I saw him last. But the words he expressed in his note to me were all the convincing I needed to halt my plans for that day and revisit his residence. I was never one for egregious bouts of spontaneity, but in spite of my incessant attempts to convince my heart—whose temperament swayed as easily as a pendulum—that I no longer cared for the housing of my youth or the man who owned it, I accepted my weak conviction for the lie it was and put to work my venture into the countryside.

His note sprouted a vicious seed within me that branched into anxiety, anger, and mourning the longer I journeyed onwards. I weaved my trusty steed over the hills, creeks, and ridges of the still familiar countryside, enveloping myself in the shadowy canopy of the deep woods as birdsong and dancing leaves sounded all about me. Indeed, it was as if I had never left these lands before, as if I were the same youth who would spend the free hours of the day smelling flowers, watching honeybees, chasing squirrels, or feeding the occasional deer. And as nature’s key unlocked the chest of my inner mind, I was upon my destination within the matter of an hour. 

The tower rested atop a small, grassy knoll crested with short ferns and thick, flowering hedges, and a dirt path broken by weeds and pebbles crept its way up the sloped surface to its entrance. The old structure would have once served the likes of soldiers guarding the surrounding woodland, and the stalwart brick comprising its ruddy surface looked no more faded than when I last saw it. The ancient oaks, withered and mighty, cast long shadows along the equally ancient cylinder while streaks of golden light splashed upon the conical roof of dark, cerulean slats. The same, spindly vines that hooked and swirled around the structure’s greying base had climbed their way up a little further, their olive green limbs reaching towards the slim window a few feet above the crown of an arched, wooden doorway.

The sight was good enough for reminiscing, and I allowed myself a moment to envision the day I first arrived there. It all looked so much bigger, frightening, grander, and mysterious as a child, but I was no less thankful when the old man allowed me refuge within the walls of his home.  

My fingers, matured but still delicate, graced the bumpy surface of the tower, surveying every small crack and hole that I could reach. I was practically embracing the structure by that point. And for that fading moment, a warm breeze swaddled my person as if the watchful giant were reciprocating my intimacy. If only that warmth were not so bittersweet.

In my youth, nights were a time for dreams, and I so often dreamed of distant cities beyond the likes of the dainty, rural towns and hamlets we visited, their homely denizens not much in the way of carrying on with excitement or frivolous fancies. Meanwhile, Kurt and his books, of which there was a great helping, helped to solidify a childish wish to adventure far beyond the walls of rock and mortar that encircled me every day. And when I finally achieved that delicious freedom through unfortunate circumstance, I treated gluttony like a saviour, indulging in knowledge as much as I indulged in good food and drink. That is not to say all was terrible in that lonely tower.

***

I used the round knocker on the door, knocking three times, pausing for a second, then knocked twice more. It was a pointless endeavour of course, for I knew there would be no answer. I simply wished to grace my ears with the familiar clang that echoed through the laboratory whenever Mr. Cameron came back home from whatever errand he was running. 

The raucous noise would rouse me out of the middle of whatever work he had put me to, be it cleaning or cooking or studying, and he would always shout and ask if I was present—not that I had the mind to be anywhere else—to which I would reply, “I am present,” before he used his key to enter.

Even as I stood on the outside of the door, my heart pounded against its bony cage, knowing there would be nothing terrible inside other than memories of mirth and goodwill, the same that were usurped by the unfortunate end I never parted with. Deep breaths escaped my nostrils as I fumbled with the letter. It was a stupid thing to do, crumpling it. But emotions made for false judgement, and I had to strain my eyes beyond the brim of their sockets to make out the smeared lines that urged me to visit at all.

“. . .I regret that I’ve never apologised for my mistakes. And yet I hope you can forgive me for the sins I’ve wrought upon you and so many others. You gave me the greatest pleasure of something I thought I’d lost forever, and for that I am so very grateful. Thus, should you choose to return to the laboratory following my departure from this world, I thought it prudent and necessary to go about leaving everything as it was since the day you left. It is a rather silly thing to do, I suppose, and it was an assuredly tedious project. But for the sake of your memory, I deemed it necessary as a way to show the Earth that there is one good thing I’ve left behind. I shall leave the tower in your care now, along with all of the money I gained from the remainder of my time spent in honest work, and I can only hope these gifts serve you well. . .”

I reached for the door’s handle, its iron hook cold and brittle in my palm. With a gentle nudge, the door squealed on its hinges as a flood of light extinguished the darkness within, illuminating all the items and baubles from my past. 

The first immediate thing to regard was that awful smell. It was not too entirely different from the vinegary scent I so often dealt with in the apothecary at my new home. But aside from that, the tower’s laboratory very much resembled the way it had when I first arrived at the age of six. 

The open chamber was circular, its wooden ceiling supported by strong timbers that held true in spite of their growing age. The floor, decorated in a starry motif of black and white tile, was still worn from years of light traffic while a veil of dust accumulated upon its surface like bits of greyish snow. Against the wall across from me, was the chestnut desk where all our paper was put to work, and the inkwell and its goose quill sat to the left of the velvet armchair that was parked there as though it had never been touched. The moment I saw it, the memories came rushing back in as if someone had broken a large dam and unleashed a devastating flood in its wake. 

It was at that table that I—that we—spent a lot of time together, going over the various alchemical symbols and what they represented, having jokes over tea, eating, playing chess, reading, sharing stories, tutoring. And as the waves of nostalgia drowned my heart beneath its raging waters, the pain in my chest only grew stronger as I approached my favourite place in the tower.

Along the left wall stood a brick oven and stove along with the worktable, the place where “magic went to play” as Mr. Cameron would have put it. The oaken table was an additional three feet wider than the writing desk, and served as the home of all our wondrous tools of creation and transmutation. Flasks, crucibles, a mortar and pestle, a scale with iron weights, an hourglass, a retort, and all other alchemical tools and instruments were set upon its surface in neat order with only the faintest traces of residue left amongst the polished glass. It was there where Mr. Cameron spent many hours demonstrating and teaching the art of alchemy in pursuit of providing cheaper, effective methods of treatment for the poor who suffered from the varying diseases that plagued the world. Even the black splotches of soot left over from failed mixtures and experiments marred the once brown surface of the table. Such incidents always left me in need of a bath in order to clean away the stench and mess, but the old man always made a point of never being frustrated with me whenever it happened, claiming that such accidents were perfect lessons on what not to do in the laboratory.

But of all these objects, there were none more abundant than the books and ingredients.

At the centre, leading straight up to the wooden hatch of an insignificant bedchamber, was a sturdy ladder of oakwood mounted on wheels that allowed us to rotate around our suspended library of thick tomes, skinny novels, and tawny scrolls. Had it not been for the light beaming down from two, stacked windows on either side of the cylindrical space, it would have been an easy miss. 

And all around the walls of the first floor, shelves upon shelves sagged under the weight of inorganic and organic items, from the common ilk of copper and tin to the bizarre likes of frog legs and maggots. Every jar was bloated with material and labelled and sealed accordingly. To the uninitiated, the glass containers showcased a grotesque display of putrid entrails and waste, and they were not exactly wrong. After all, such ingredients were necessary to provide the asinine solutions and remedies that so many hastily fell for without the faintest idea that they had been cheated. 

I had not intended on staying any longer than I had to, but as memories, both good and bad, continued to overflow, I found myself paralysed as my gentle touch and empty gaze lingered on an image I had almost entirely forgotten.

Hanging above our writing desk was a framed, monochrome picture of a young man and a young woman with an infant sitting in her lap. They were adorned in fine clothing, looking every part of the typical bourgeois family, and their smiles, though small to keep their mouths from cramping, seemed genuine. However, a knife had been put to the picture at some point, leaving a rather ugly gash along the man’s face and torso whilst the rest remained unharmed. I asked Mr. Cameron about the photograph abundantly before, but he never obliged with a solid answer. I only knew that he would always observe the image with some faraway, sombre look in his eyes accompanied by a frown that I never understood.

To the left of the picture was another. It depicted Mr. Cameron himself, a senior man with silvery mutton chops about a narrow jaw that stopped harshly at a triangular, dimpled chin. His steel eyes were as hollow as his cheeks, and addressed the viewer with an empty stare that could only be described as dour. He was clothed in his signature attire, wearing a sack coat over a spencer vest, his thinning legs hidden beneath the slate curtain of his trousers. All the while, his balding dome, whose hairline so woefully retreated to the back of his head, had chosen to withdraw itself from the public eye by hiding beneath the elusive curve of a charcoal derby hat. He looked every part the grave gentleman he put on for the populace, but when he found me, I learned to love him as though he were the kindest man ever, an opinion that, sadly, was destined to fall into ruin.

***

Let it be said that bringing me up and out of homelessness was a blessing I grant him the privilege of providing. My issue on the matter rested purely with the manipulation wrought upon the ill, and myself, in the name of dirty funds. Mr. Cameron presented himself as a well-to-do pharmacist who sought to provide those in need with potions and tonics that would make quick work of whatever sorry ailments happened to befall someone. If they suffered from boils, he’d have a cure for it. If they suffered a fever, there was a cure for that. If someone suffered from pneumonia, there was a cure for that too. But compared to other quacks, he was a bit smarter about it than I was willing to give him credit for.

Through methods he never disclosed to me, he would occasionally obtain small crates of actual medicines proven to assist people with more common ills. However, he disguised such remedies by pouring them into flasks marked with his “patented” brand to deceive his victims into believing his products were not of malpractice. To say he was lucky to have lasted for so long without being discovered was a colossal understatement, and how ironic it was that his favourite animal would happen to be a duck.

But I was as much a fool as the rest, and I hold no shame in admitting that I was undoubtedly the biggest fool of them all.

To anyone else who saw me as I child, I was a troublesome urchin willing to swindle anyone if it meant I would have food in my stomach before curfew. But where they saw a no good thief, Mr. Cameron saw an opportunity. I knew nothing of the ways of true alchemy or for what purpose such practice existed. I believed that every potion that we made, that all the weird, yet common, ingredients that we gathered, were for the sake of bettering the lives of those who had no one to turn to as their health deteriorated. But no. Like everything else in his home, I was a spool designed to spin him a golden profit from a wheel of lies. And alas, it wasn’t till my seventeenth, that his plans finally fell apart.

Given the ingredients we used, I would not be surprised to hear that our potions proved agitating for our buyers, but—save for one—I would never know otherwise. To avoid dissatisfied customers, we travelled beyond those settlements nearest our home to discourage stalking and would leave at the earliest convenience whenever Mr. Cameron was satisfied with our sales. While I would have once argued that most of our ingredients were harmless, I could make no argument for mouse droppings. 

He utilised them in, what he claimed, was an attempt to try and create a panacea—an elixir that could cure every ailment known to man. Of course, there was absolutely no scientific evidence to suggest that such a thing would ever work, let alone if it were possible to create a panacea. But in the week following my birthday, he had sunk his money into the investment of a brothel that sank before it swam and was desperate to keep his business afloat. The unfortunate victim who fell to this greedy ambition was a poor man who wished to save his mother from a horrible fever that left her bedridden. Unfortunately, the “panacea”—which took from the man the last of his coin—gave her typhus, and the second night after saw her deceased.

The incident prompted us to flee from the town immediately, and other than taking on a new name, trying his hardest to let his hair grow, and acquiring a new attire, he also abandoned me at the tower. It was at that moment in which I concluded that I never really mattered, and that everything we had done together was for naught. I packed my clothes along with whatever money he left behind and used half of it to support charity work while I used the rest to support myself. 

In some ways, I suppose his acquisition of me wasn’t entirely negative. Surely, he must have been an actual alchemist at some point, as much of what he taught me was the same as what my new mentor instructed as well. I was provided with food and clothes. I was provided with gifts and entertainment. He was never harsh to me, always treating me with kindness while maintaining a firm yet calm authority that I respected. He was a man I once trusted with my life. But trust is a very delicate gift, and to have it be broken so suddenly and in such poor faith was a pain I wished I did not have to suffer.

The fact that he returned there at all just to clean the place up for me before he passed, was admittedly a welcome surprise. When he left, I thought him a heartless and cruel man whose greed was of greater importance than others' lives. That opinion was not destined to change anytime soon, but as I looked between the two pictures once more, I believed I had discovered the answer that Mr. Cameron was so hesitant to admit to both his heart and mine. I was the child he never got to raise.