Scott Mariani - The Alchemist

What about the broken words above the MLR? Ben sat back on the couch. He’d always hated puzzles. He gazed into space. A moth flew past his nose and he watched it flit towards the lamp on the table next to him. It darted here and there and then flew inside the thin cloth lampshade. He could see it walking up the other side of the material, transparent with the light from the bulb.

Then it hit him. With the light comes salvation.

He gripped the three pages together on their own, folding the rest of the notebook away from them, and held them up to the lamp. The light shone through the flimsy paper, and suddenly the jumbled letters formed themselves into recognizable words. Taken together, the three blocks of text now read:

FIN

L’EAU ROTIE

LE LAC D’SANG

M.L.R

THE END

THE ROASTED WATER

THE LAKE OF BLOOD

M.L.R

Maybe we’re getting somewhere now , he thought.

Then again, maybe not.

OK, break it down into bite-size pieces. ‘The End’-what was that, just saying it was the end of the book? That was all he could make of it. But at least that was more than he could understand of roasted water and lakes of blood. He rubbed his eyes, bit his lip. For a moment, his frustration gave way to fury and he had to control a powerful urge to tear the notebook to shreds. He gulped, tried to calm down, stared sullenly at the phrases for a long minute. Willed them to reveal some kind of meaning to him.

FIN

L’EAU ROTIE

LE LAC D’SANG

M.L.R

But if it really didn’t mean anything, why go to the trouble of setting up the phrases over three consecutive pages like that?

Like most self-taught linguists, Ben’s spoken French was far more fluent than his grasp of the written language. As far as he could make out, though, the line ‘the lake of blood’ should have read in French ‘LE LAC DE SANG’. Instead it had been written as ‘LE LAC D’SANG’ , with an important letter missed out. Was it just a mistake? It didn’t seem to be. The spelling looked deliberately done that way. But why?

He struggled to think clearly. It was almost as if…as if the writer was playing with the form, toying with the letters…compensating for a lack of letters? Now why would he do that?

An anagram?.

He snatched a piece of hotel notepaper from the table and started scribbling. He began eliminating one letter at a time by circling them, trying to create new words out of the strange phrases. He got as far as ‘L’UILE ROTIE N’A MAL… ‘the roasted oil has not wrong’…when he realized it was a blind alley and lost patience with it.

Scrunch. He threw the paper ball furiously across the room and started again on a fresh sheet.

Five more attempts, and he was beginning to think he’d end up buried alive in crumpled paper. But now it was beginning to look like something coherent.

In another fifteen minutes he had it. He looked down at his sheet. The new words weren’t in French, but in the real author’s native Italian.

IL GRANDE MAESTRO FULCANELLI.

The great master Fulcanelli.

It was his signature. Ben breathed deeply. It looked as though this was what he’d been searching for all along.

There was only one small problem. Even if what he had here was a word-for-word transcription of the elusive Fulcanelli manuscript, he still didn’t have anything worth taking back to Fairfax. If the old man had thought the manuscript was going to offer up some kind of medical prescription, or a simple home recipe for making life-saving potions with easy step-by-step diagrams, he couldn’t have been more mistaken. A cryptic mass of arcane riddles and gibberish wasn’t ever going to help little Ruth. This search wasn’t over yet. It was only just beginning. It was after 6.30 am. Light-headed with fatigue, Ben rested back on the couch and closed his burning eyes.

The night breeze rustled the treetops above him. He sat on his haunches, perfectly still and unseen in the bushes, waiting and watching, as silent and patient as any of the wild predatory creatures that lived in the dark forest around him. His mind was shut off from the pain of his cuts and bruises, the graze on his cheekbone and the rawness of his palms after sliding down through the branches of the trellis. He hardly felt anything any longer. But his rage felt like a bubble of molten steel in his throat.

There was nothing Franco Bozza hated worse than failure, than being thwarted, especially when success had seemed so assured. His prizes had been taken from him, and he was powerless to do anything about it. He’d lost.

For the moment.

He waited a while longer, his breathing slowing down as his fury diminished to a simmering rage. His head cocked as he heard the siren in the distance. The wail of the ambulance grew louder on the empty country road, and then it sped by Bozza’s hiding-place, turning the trees and bushes momentarily blue with its flashing lights.

He watched it approaching the entrance to the villa further up the road, slowing for the turn. Before it got there, car headlights appeared, coming the opposite way. Seconds later a battered Renault passed the ambulance in the narrow road. It seemed to slow as the ambulance turned into the villa’s drive, then it picked up speed and Bozza could hear the rattle of its engine approaching. As it came by, he was already moving through the trees to the hidden Porsche.

He caught up with it easily and quickly. As he drew nearer, he waited for a bend in the road where a junction turned off. He switched off the lights. If the Renault driver was paying attention, it would look as though the car behind had turned off in another direction.

Now he sat focused with all his concentration in the darkened, invisible Porsche, with only the dim tail-lights of the Renault to lead the way down the twisting lanes. After a few miles his quarry slowed and turned into the drive of a small country hotel. He pulled the Porsche over to the side of the road, got out and slipped into the grounds.

Hope and the American woman didn’t see him as they walked inside the hotel, but he was only fifty metres away in the shadows. He was under the trees looking up at the building when he saw lights come on. Middle window, first floor.

Time passed. Around midnight he saw two figures in the window. They were dancing. Dancing. Then they disappeared and the windows went dark.

Bozza waited a while longer, methodically calculating the layout of the hotel. Then he circled the building until he found a kitchen entrance that wasn’t locked. He stalked along the quiet corridors until he came to the door he wanted. His spare knife was tucked through his belt.

Bozza was inserting his wire pick into the lock when the strip of yellow light appeared at the bottom of the door to the honeymoon suite. He cursed silently, withdrew the lock-pick and retreated into the dark corridor. Hope was too dangerous to confront without the element of surprise. He’d have to wait longer for his chance.

But it would come, it would come.

Ben awoke with a jolt. He could hear the sound of footsteps and movement from the room above. Voices in the corridor outside.

He looked at his watch and swore. It was almost nine. All around him were his notes and scribbles from last night. He suddenly remembered his discovery of the encrypted Fulcanelli signature. He wanted to tell the news to Roberta.

He went into the bedroom and saw that the four-poster was empty. He called her name at the bathroom door, then went in when there was no answer. She wasn’t there either. Where the hell had she gone?

He didn’t like it. He grabbed the pistol, tucked it away out of sight. Left the suite and made his way downstairs. Down in the dining-room, the British tourist group were eating breakfast and all talking loudly. There was no sign of Roberta. He walked into the empty lobby. Through a door, a group of staff were huddled in a circle jabbering in loud, urgent whispers.