The Alchemist
by Graham Swanson
A second body was found one hundred years after the first one. A mercury arc rectifier burst at the old electric plant. But it was no accident.
It takes 5 seconds to die in liquid mercury. First it causes the skin to boil until it melts off, then it causes eyeballs to explode. A person with these burns can still be saved however. The fatal stage is asphyxiation. It damages the respiratory pathways from the mouth and nostrils to the lungs and stomach. The body goes unconscious, and death follows.
The first body they found died in about 5 seconds. They knew it was no accident. He didn’t slip and fall. He was dipped by the ankles, pulled out, dipped in again until the skin peeled from his face, and finally dropped inside where he sank to the bottom, and was dead before the sludge from the body even arose to the surface.
The second body survived for 15 seconds.
Rumor among the strange folk was that what we call liquid mercury has been known since the times of Ancient Egypt, and is actually the seed water of Gods. A Detective examining the remains found the two dead bodies didn’t behave as how victims of chemical burns should. The mercury hardened into shapes of horned creatures, or solid chains. He looked deeper into the tissue. He found FINGERS that clasped around the wrists of the dead.
The bodies seemed to not only regenerate, but grow strange things. Like a shield of bone around the chest that covered the neck and chin.
They tried to incinerate the bodies, but no matter the temperature, the corpses remained intact.
Puzzled, he turned to an Alchemist who hid out where no one could interrupt his experiments. A place with no electricty, where timezones don't add up. The Alchemist laughed when he told him the story. He didn’t explain the behavior of mercury like how the Detective expected. Instead the old man brought out a crumbling book from the Renaissance. Inside were dense paragraphs in old Greek on one page with a Latin copy on the other page. Notes were scribbled inside for an English translation someday. But what the Alchemist showed him were pictures of terrible monsters, and silver bowls at the throats of warriors.
"They called it Liquid Silver. It's older than Rome. Older than Egypt. Older than the names of Gods. Human weapons don’t work against them. They had to use a secret power from the heavens. Liquid Silver is what they use to defeat them in their war with the Underworld.”
The Alchemist pointed to the hand made drawings of ferocious toothed, winged faery creatures, with the heads of birds, and the udders and horns of cattle.
When the Detective returned, the bodies had changed even more. They grew wings, spikes, spear heads, armored collars. The only explanation he could think of came from the words of the Alchemist. That in the times when man waged war with the underworld, that human warriors would swallow liquid mercury and transform into a warrior capable of fighting the demons.
The Detective looked at the straight pearl white teeth of the corpses. They seemed to snarl at him.
The Detective turned back to old lore from the Alchemist. The Alchemist stood by the glass tubes that contained blue sprites of energy. A mercury rectifier arc. He explained to the Detective that before roads and powerlines, once winged demons- or terrible angels- scoured the plains, and lay ruin to the hamlets and cottages of their ancestors.
“Look into the rectifier” The Alchemist bade him.
The Detective was compelled to do so as he heard screams and ancient languages coming from the blue energy placed between the glass cylinders. What he saw inside looked like the corpses with their wings and spears, but more refined, emerging from the fumes, suddenly every memory of growing up in these plains- his friends, school, the playground- HE was there. His eyes were wheels of fire. His voice a trumpet blast. His hand, cold to the touch. He soared over their heads as the moon floats over entire hills of ants.
The creature the detective saw in the rectifier was not limited to inside the room. He also existed outside and beyond. Within his very consciousness, and without its abysmal presence, he feared he could no longer return to a life unknowing what the Alchemist had shown him in the glass.
“That there is the God of the Underworld! What we call liquid mercury is sap from his offspring.”
The Detective hurried back to where the bodies were kept cold, and locked away. However when he got to the mortuary, he found the windows shattered, the door blown off the hinges by the wind, and a huge hole in the roof. The hole went through the floor below, to the basement, where even the drawers where they keep bodies were torn open, and the dead were left to walk free.
The two corpses were gone.
The Detective remembered the lore of a village destroyed by the angels. He hurried to get there. Its best days had passed. The homes sank into the earth, heaps of bricks still lay in the grass. Walls of broken down cars and farm equipment stood against the side of the uneven, dirt road. Strange folk with black eyes stood on their porches with pitchforks. He stopped his car.
"Where did they go?"
An old woman pointed a long gnarled finger towards the fields.
On the edge of the fields was a crater.
Records told of a tornado that tore the sky open, uprooted the trees, and leveled the homes down to the foundation. However the old folk seemed to recognize the shadows of the demons that swept overhead. They told stories of lightning that struck so hard that it vaporized the trees, houses, and people. The Detective came to the crater in the ground where the storm hit so hard that it vaporized everything its lightning touched. In the middle he saw curtains of debris and mist and dust sweep across, and in the middle stood another mercury rectifier arc. One bigger than any human hand can manufacture. Blue light poured from the glass cylinders. He heard a scream from within. He saw the perfect teeth inside.He saw a smile.
Then it occured to him. That the bodies had not DIED in the mercury. They had been RECHARGING.
There and then he saw the wings cut through the gusts of shadow and murk. He saw himself flying over the hamlets, looking down at the people, remembering how small they once appeared to the mighty warriors of the sky, how much he remembered enjoying seeing it from flight.
The Detective heard his own voice in the blue light. A creature stepped forward. Behind him something landed hard. Then another, and another. Until the moon vaporised in a cloud of blue light. Across the fields and praries,old machines began to wake up.
