IX. The Visions of Amanita Muscaria

A loud whistle blows and a burst of steam erupts from Doctor Arthwitte’s alchemy station. He spins in his stool and, using an old sock to protect his hand from the heat, he removes the cast iron kettle from the flame. He blows it out then he takes a bubbling vial from a wire coat hanger fashioned into a stand holding it over an equally repurposed lamp. Snuffing the wick, he adds the contents of the vial into a cast iron cauldron filled with ashes.

When he scoops up the cauldron and carries it away, the empty vial rolls off his desk and shatters.

Doctor Arthwitte sets the kettle and bowl on the floor in the center of the room. “Fetch my old tunic, the white one with a hole in it.” He reaches for his flask sock and finds it empty. “And my flask, there should be some spirits left in there.”

“You weren’t drinking when you made that mushroom tea, were you?” Penelope asks.

“What I have concocted is a spagyric in the old alchemical tradition by combining salt, sulfur, and mercury of the amanita muscaria.”

Dorian rifles through the books and pamphlets on the bed. “Isn’t mercury poisonous?”

“Not literal mercury. These are the three fundamental principles behind all matter. First is salt, the principle of fixity, the inert and immutable state of the matter.” He sifts the bowl of ashes.

“Because everything you burn is ashes?” my sister asks.

“Precisely,” Doctor Arthwitte says. “Behold, calcinated salt of amanita muscaria. Next is sulfur, which is the essence of fire, derived from–”

“Why aren’t the ashes fire?” Dorian asks.

“Because ashes are not fire,” Doctor Arthwitte replies. “Fire is the element closest to the divine, it represents the duality intrinsic in all things. Therefore, sulfur is the essential oils extracted from the subject. That leaves us with mercury – and no, not literal mercury,” Doctor Arthwitte says out of the side of his mouth closest to Dorian.

“Got it, not mercury,” Dorian says, his face buried in a loose stack of scribbled notes formerly held together by a paperclip. “It’s part of the mushroom soaked in alcohol.”

“Why…,” Doctor Arthwitte sits dumbstruck. “That’s precisely correct: a fermented sample of the specimen. Astute observation.”

“It was the only one left and you hadn’t added booze.”

“Mercury is representative of water and mutability, the potential for change waiting to be drawn out. It is the binding substrate of the manifestation.”

He pours the contents of his flask out into the bowl of ashes. Using a pair of tweezers, he plucks the chopped hunks of mushroom out of the swirling muck and sets them on the old shirt. “Since fermentation was impossible given our timeframe, I opted for alcoholic distillation.”

“And drinking that will give you… what?” Penelope asks.

“Inspiration. Meditation. Hopefully? A revelation.”

“What about ‘how to break a spell’?”

“Break a spell?” Doctor Arthwitte turns back to Penelope, his eyes narrowed. “What was it that Crowley said to you?”

My sister looks down at her hands. “He said that the vampires we saw weren’t the only ones. There’s another kind, psychic vampires. They created them.”

“Seems a bit excessive.”

“He said it was a distraction.”

“How?” Dorian asks. “This vampire outbreak was probably the only important thing to ever happen here. If it weren’t for them, nobody would even know about this town.”

“The boy makes a fine point,” Doctor Arthwitte says.

“Exactly,” Penelope says. “If you want to hide something you’re doing, you find someone else to accuse of it first – you put all the attention on them and then manipulate the situation to shift blame. Then anyone who knows the truth has to waste all their time reacting to you.”

“Who taught you this?” Doctor Arthwitte asks.

“Olivia.”

Dorian snorts. “I told you she was scary.”

“Well, fine, maybe she was scary,” Penelope says, rising. “But she was smart. And she wasn’t afraid to say the truth when everyone else denied it. So, fine, maybe that made her scary. Maybe you have to be scary if you want to be right.” She puts her hands on her hips. “I’d rather be scary than stupid.”

“And what about Crowley?” Doctor Arthwitte asks. “Perhaps he told you that Olivia was his student in order to throw you off guard, make you more susceptible to his persuasion. I saw him work the very strategem upon various members of the Golden Dawn – as well as the press.”

“That’s… yes, I have considered that.”

“But psychic vampires… this does give me pause; I’ve heard talk of such beings before. I believe it was Dion Fortune who first wrote on the subject. According to her, psychic vampires are astral beings, spirits born into our material world in human bodies by ritual and happenstance. They are erratic, tempestuously emotional, some taken by wild and violent anger, others by a deep and brooding melancholy. They feed upon the emotions and life force of their victims, usually through their dreams. One could always know the mark of their feeding: tiny pin prick sized holes. Oh, aye!”

Doctor Arthwitte peers over the top of his glasses and squints at my brother. “Put those papers down and step closer. Egads! Exactly as Dion Fortune described!”

“Marcel had me under his glamour,” Dorian says. “His hand was lit up with this rainbow color, it was like–”

“Like oil on water, but if it glowed,” Penelope says.

“I presume the source of these markings.” Doctor Arthwitte heaves a heavy sigh. “There can be no denying the obvious facts in front of us. The impossible has fallen into our laps: Aleister Crowley is telling the truth.”

Penelope’s head sinks. “Then everything he said about Olivia was probably true too. How many spirits are there in the world?”

“Difficult to assess,” Doctor Arthwitte says. “All manner of creatures exist in the world of the mind and human history. There are the elementals, like the Salamanders. And of course we have the lesser spirits of the Legemeton – those were the favored workings of Crowley.”

“Lesser spirits?” Penelope asks.

“The common name for them is demons,” Doctor Arthwitte says, gravely. “Very well, you’ve given me much to consult on the matter.” Eyes closed, he crosses his legs and places his palms on his knees. He takes a deep breathe in then lets it out slowly, three times over, each one longer than the one before. “Perhaps audible stimulation will help. Is my Tibetan sounding bowl in that pile over there?”

“No,” Dorian says, without checking.

Doctor Arthwitte lifts the bowl to his lips, knocks his head back, and downs the spagyric in one open throated gulp. His look of disgust gives way to contented wonder as he smacks his lips together.

“Delectably – cough – rareified yet common, simplistic in flavour but altogether inspiring aftertaste, with an earthy hint of nut. Unless my olfactory senses deceive me, I also detect faint traces of–hlork!”

As if gripped by an invisible, malevolent spirit, Doctor Arthwitte drops the cast iron bowl, hugs his belly, and doubles over. A loud, hoarse growl erupts from his mouth as a belch sneaks past his lips.

“Bag,” he roars between coughs, his bloodshot eyes wide as bulging veins creep up his neck. “I’ve need to exp–plurgh!” Doctor Arthwitte covers his mouth with one curled fist as his cheeks blow outwards. “A digestive expulsion is imminent!”

Penelope and Dorian scramble to their feet and search the room for a suitable sick bag. She takes to the drawers, opening each indivdual one among the four of them to find nothing. Dorian rifles through the pile of junk on Doctor Arthwitte’s Murphy bed, where he finds a shiny brass bowl.

Quick to avoid impending gastrointestinal disaster, Dorian slides the dish between the old man’s knees then backs away. Doctor Arthwitte claps his meaty fingers around it and three plumes of spagyric and bile fire out of him. “Oh, my Tibetan Singing bowl.” He puts it to his ear and smiles, “Such lovely music.”

The bowl falls out of his hand and clatters to the floor, rolling on one side and spilling out the reeking mess. Doctor Arthwitte curls into a fetal position, his teeth gnashing and grinding together. The veins on the side of his neck are throbbing, and a sopping deluge of sweat pours off his face.

Penelope hurries back over to him with a well-timed side step to avoid the puddle of sick on the floor. “He’s poisoned. We need to–”

A cyclonic wind whips through the room. The curtains billow as a gale force stirs the lantern flames. They flicker and dim, transforming the shadows they cast into a disorienting strobe. Penelope stumbles back when she sees something move: perhaps a shadow, perhaps a glimmer of whatever unseen force is at work here.

She turns to the door but a sharp click signals that it has locked by itself.

“Who did that?” Dorian backs away from their circle until he bumps into the doctor’s bed. A lamp teeters off the window ledge and shatters on the floor, gushing forth a fiery puddle of oil. The cyclone intensifies and the flames swell and expand, ready to fill the room.

Then the wind stops. The flames snuff out at once. There is nothing but a dark silence.

“Are you okay?” Dorian coughs.

“I can’t open the door,” my sister cries.

Now a howling comes. The floor beneath him undulates and shifts, as if the wooden planks underfoot are made of millions of people, their hands rising up from between the floorboards, grabbing at him, trying to pull him under.

Doctor Arthwitte lays crumpled in a fetal position, his arms tightly clutched to his abdomen. “Gray… graveyard,” he gurgles out. “Graveyard!”

The howling stops. Then the oil lamps relight in unison. Nothing is broken, no scorch marks or shattered glass litter the floor, as if it were all a vivid nightmare.

“What the hell was that?” Dorian asks.

Penelope doesn’t know what to say. She looks at the calcinator, at the spilled tonic on the floor, nudges the chunks of fermented mushroom by her toes. “What do you expect me to say?”

“You think we inhaled the fumes of the mushroom or… or… I don’t know,” Dorian says.

That’s what Penelope wants the truth to be too. That they were driven temporarily mad by the same toxic brew Doctor Arthwitte drank. That the vapors or fumes or whatever left over from the spagyric caused what they saw.

“But how could we both see the same thing?”

“Graveyard,” Doctor Arthwitte mumbles.

“Doctor Arthwitte!” Penelope hurries to his side. “Are you alright?”

“Penelope?” he asks, feebly. “What happened?”

“You didn’t see that?” Dorian asks, wiping his chin. His attention swings back and forth between them and the floor, anxious that it might reach up and grab him should he let down his guard.

“See what?” Doctor Arthwitte asks, his skin pale and clammy. Penelope helps him to his feet. “I focused on a manifestation,” he says, hoarse and feebly tugging at his pocket. “Then… blackness.” He measures up the room as he retrieves a cloth napkin from his inner coat then dabs gingerly at his cheeks and forehead. “A necessary risk of the alchemist.”

“We saw something,” Penelope says.

“Like a vision?” Doctor Arthwitte gasps, taking a bug-eyed account of his expelled serum. “Neither of you drank the spagyric, did you? You must be honest, that specimen was far too potent for a child to drink.” He takes two wobbly steps backwards along with a raspy gulp of air, gently waving his arms about for balance. “Mayhaps for anyone to drink. Make note of this children, there are always unforeseen ramifications in trade deals with pirates.”

“No, we didn’t drink it. And what we saw wasn’t real.”

“Impossible.” Doctor Arthwitte plops onto the bed next to Dorian and rubs his forehead with both his palms. “There was no chance of exposure through vapors. If neither of you drank the brew then I am at an utter loss as to the source of the vision.”

Glass bells chime in my sister’s left ear when a rainbow flicker, that electric yellow-teal-pink of my light, appears beside her – but when she turns her head, all she sees is the wavering lit lamp wick. I may seem cruel to tease Penelope with these convoluted messages, answers that only offer more questions. But cruelty is a lie born of morality.

“Wait,” Dorian points to his chest. “What if this is what turns you into a vampire?”

Penelope stares at the lamp flame as it stands perfectly still. She concentrates on that one spot in the room, on that one tiny point in reality, trying to call back the magical light. Something warm on the side of her head tingles. Her vision becomes blurry and she feels the room begin to spin around here.

“What do you think, Penelope?” Dorian asks. “Penelope!”

“Huh, what?” she asks, coming out of a daze.

“Theatrics,” Doctor Arthwitte says. “I’ve been infected by a vampire and succumbed to a botched poison all within the course of a singular evening and somehow your brother is the one reduced to a histrionic mess.”

“We can’t be sure of that,” Penelope says, absent-mindedly. “We can’t be sure of anything anymore.” She tries to call the light again, waits for the tingling sensation, but no matter how hard she concentrates, nothing happens. “For all we know, it was one of the psychic vampires’ tricks.”

Dorian snaps his fingers. “Are you listening to me?” he asks. “Do either of you hear me?”

Doctor Arthwitte slaps him. “Snap out of it, lad. You’re working yourself up into a frenzy.”

“We have to go to the graveyard,” Dorian says. “That’s what the vision said. Maybe there’s a cure in the graveyard. You heard the old gyspy woman, they’re patrolling the village. We can go to the graveyard now while everyone is distracted and–”

“Absolutely not,” Doctor Arthwitte says. “It is far past nightfall, and we’ve both been attacked once enough by these monsters.”

“Are you serious?” Dorian whimpers. “For all we know, you might wake up and I’m already… already…”

“We don’t know for certain,” Penelope says. “We’ll have to see what’s in the graveyard.”

“What is this queer obsession the two of you have with the graveyard of all places?”

“We should take a shovel,” my sister adds. “The old man probably has an extra somewhere.”

“Now hold on,” Doctor Arthwitte says, grunting from fatigue as he slides his ample frame between the children and the doorway. “I haven’t seen the two of you so worked up since the boy got himself bitten by the Baskerville hound.”

“I thought he was a werewolf – we all thought he was a werewolf!” Dorian begins hyperventilating.

“You said it yourself – we need to go to the graveyard.”

“Me?” Doctor Arthwitte asks. “I said no such thing.”

“During the vision,” Penelope says. “You kept saying, ‘graveyard,’ while you were on the floor.”

“Did I now? Fascinating.” His shoulders go stiff as if taken by a paralyzing rictis and he leans against the wall. He slides down into a crumpled mess on the floor as he dictates.

“Write this down, boy. Title: ‘Epi-phenomenal Evidence and Bystander Testimony as a Requisite to Alchemical Manifestation: A Case Study. Synopsis:–” He blows a wet cough into his handerkief then returns it to his pocket. “For years, alchemical illumination has been assumed a solitary and subjective experience, a pursuit of personal enlightenment combining the individual manifestations of the mind and the known natural sciences. However, in a freak incident of daring and intrepid field science, m invesitagtions have–”

He yawns.

“Er, uh, new evidence has… a... urhm, yes, I…,” Doctor Arthwitte closes his eyes, and snoring soon follows.

Dorian hikes one leg up and over the doctor to reach the door. He tries to lean Doctor Arthwitte to the side to no avail. With both hands on the man’s shoulders, my brother heaves with all his might until the veins in his thin neck bulge.

Penelope tries to help by pushing Doctor Arthwitte from behind. When that fails, they attempt to lift him from the spot, each holding one of his arms, but the dead weight of their mentor’s body is too much. My siblings inevitably lose their grip and tumble backwards.

“Do we let him sleep there?” Dorian pants.

Penelope rolls over and pushes herself up. “We can go out the window.” She throws the curtains open to find that their windows are boarded up. “Right, forgot about that.”

“What do we do?”

“Do you think we can break through?”

“Do you see an ax?”

My sister eyes the chum strewn upon the floor, Doctor Arthwitte’s iron pot leaning on one leg. “Nothing.”

“The gypsy will be thrilled.” He begins to quake. His knees buckle and he slides down the wall, his back planted the entire descent. Fear gives way to anguish, and soon his face is buried in his hands. His muffled sobbing leaks out. “What happens when I… when I…”

My sister and I are familiar with his weak will, his soft heart, his anxious soul. Penelope coddled him, encouraged his sensitivity, sought out what he was instead of what he could be. In her vain quest to comfort him, she was gelding an already stunted calf.

I, on the other hand, never admired my brother’s capacity to emulate a woman.

Penelope sighs and kneels down in front of him. “I’m sorry.”

“No,” Dorian says with a sniff. “I’m… I’m just being a–”

A coward.

“And I’m being a… well, you know,” Penelope says. “We’re tired, we’re stressed, we need sleep.”

“Vampires are real,” Dorian says. “Magick is real and Olivia was a student to the most evil magician in history. What else is real?”

“I’m not so sure,” Penelope says. “It seemed like a dream to me.”

“You have a point,” Dorian says. “Now that I think about it, everything was sort of… hazy.”

“Exactly,” Penelope says. “Who knows what we saw? For all we know it was a psychic vampire trying to throw us off a trail.”

“You think so?”

Penelope shrugs.

“You’re going to bed like that?”

“You can bathe in some rusty tub if you want.” Penelope slaps her hands on her thighs and walks over to the bed. She throws off her coat and overalls then slides under the covers. Her eyes go wide, “Oh my god, I forgot how good it feels to sleep in an actual bed.”

Dorian joins her on his side of the bed. “How long has it been? Months?” he asks. “I want to say it was in Brasil? Sure beats an old rug on a stone floor or the back seat of a car.”

Sleep is rarely comfortable or easy to come by for them and the plush feather mattress proves stronger than even the vampire’s glamour in seducing them to sleep.

With the cunning and alacrity of a thief, a dream descends upon my sister. It is a curious thing, to dream. Few take them seriously, my sister included.

She is unaware of the psychic ambushes that lurk within our dreams.