Margaret Mahy - Alchemy

Suddenly, he is suspended in a space which falls away beneath him and yet somehow embraces him too. Roland blinks. Those distant grains of light are really suns. He blinks again, and silence shivers through him. It is all around him, yet he feels it deep inside his head like a song he has not yet sung aloud. He has still to find the best words for it. There is no feeling of rising or falling. In this endless space Roland feels he is both a grain of dust and a great flaring sun. He has found himself.

The lid of the long box opens. Sunlight bursts in on him , making him blink, while the people out there peer at him, smiling, clapping and exclaiming. Quando bows, then gestures at Roland as if he himself had just invented the boy. Smiling, he helps him to sit up again. Roland is, for some reason, anxious to stand up on his own, but Quando catches his shoulders in an unexpectedly hard grip, and holds him still, looking sharply into his eyes. Their faces are only centimetres apart.

“ Where were you?” Quando asks in a low voice. “You disappeared. Where did you go? What did you see? ”

But then a new voice cuts in. That voice, heard for the first time, seems to come from deep inside Roland’s own head, warning him, and giving him urgent instructions.

“Shhhh!” it says, like a small wave breaking on an endless shore. “Shhh! Say nothing! Don’t let on!”

And now something else floods through Roland – mischief perhaps, or his own sort of secret greed. Those moments spent hanging in space, with no beginning and no ending, are going to be his alone.

“It was dark,” he says, looking innocently into Quando’s ginger-coloured eyes. “I was shut in, but I wasn’t frightened.”

Quando blinks, but his expression does not change. All the same, he expresses something very like relief as he straightens, laughs, then turns towards Roland’s father who is waiting a step or two behind them.

“So! Well! Thank you for trusting me with your little treasure, sir,” he cries. “Of course, he does have the gift , doesn’t he? Not many people would recognise it.” And Roland feels, just as surely if he were looking up at them, their glances lock somewhere above his head.

“A gift?” his father repeats. He laughs awkwardly. “We can always be grateful for a gift, can’t we?” Quando laughs too.

“Some day he may be as talented as I am,” says Quando. And he gives Roland a little parcel wrapped in silver paper, so that Roland knows he really does have a gift.

Then Roland’s father picks up his son and carries him off through the fair.

“What happened to you in that box?” he asks. “Quando took the box to pieces in front of us, but you weren’t there.”

“I was turned into a star,” Roland boasts.

“You were a star, all right,” his father replies heartily, but Roland has the odd feeling that his father is talking about something different. They sit down under an oak tree and Roland opens the silver parcel which holds six coloured felt pens, a little colouring book and a bar of chocolate. And it is now – now, when everything is over, after he has negotiated the coffin and listened to that inner voice speaking from deep inside his own head – it is now that fear strikes at him… He is being changed! He is being told something that he doesn’t want to hear. And he can’t block his ears because it is being said from deep inside him… said… said… said. An endless word going on and on. Roland has to break it down into short, repeated exclamations in order to understand! Yes! it is saying … Yes! Over and over again. Then , Up! Up! Up! And, almost immediately, that other inner voice speaks out once more, warning him, just as it had warned him earlier about talking too freely to Quando. Whoa! Careful! it says. Take no notice! It’s nothing. It’s nothing! It’s nothing! Three times, like a spell. But the other voice is strong. It rises in pitch and intensity. Up! Up! Up! Yes! it insists.

And suddenly he is terrified and begins to scream: “I don’t want it. I don’t want it. I don’t want to be twisted and changed.” Fear is making him sick… he is actually going to be sick… rendingly sick. He is going to be torn in two.

Roland woke! He woke, straining and retching, soaked with perspiration though the night around him was cool. More than cool: chilly! For a second or two all he could do was struggle with his convulsing stomach muscles. “Stop it!” he exclaimed, commanding his stomach to behave, just as if it were a disobedient dog. “Be still! Down! Down!” Little by little, he relaxed against his crushed damp pillow, set free from the curious triple life of his dream, back in real time once more.

That dream! Yet again! Exactly as it had been every other time he had dreamed it. That first dreaming must have engraved itself on him in some indelible way. Always supposing the first dream had really been a dream…

“ Careful ,” said the inner voice (familiar by now) intruding as it always did at this point, warning him off… not that he needed to be warned. “ Take care. ”

So Roland was careful. He made himself think vague thoughts of school instead. And slowly the repetitive sighing eased and retreated; honest silence repossessed him, filling his head once more. Roland was able to lie in the dark and think things over.

Of course, other people also had dreams that repeated themselves, but this one seemed even harder to understand now that he was seventeen than it had when he first dreamed it at three or four. Because who could imagine hanging in outer space, and doing nothing except being there? Anyone set free from gravity would want to play some sort of somersaulting game, would want to kick out and dance among the suns, shouting, “Look at me!” And what was the endless word that had begun to sigh at him… that still sighed at him from time to time? It took concentration to hold that word at bay. And why did the sheer nonsense of this dream terrify him in the way that it invariably did? Why was it the harmless ending of the dream and not the darkness inside the coffin that frightened him so much? And why did he always wake out of it sweating and heaving? It was to do with the possibility of becoming something his father might not recognise.

So why, when he was both frightened by it and impatient with the nonsense of it, did the dream also seem more important than anything going on in his outside life? And why, in spite of his fear, did he sometimes long to hang like a sun among other suns, set in a place into which he fitted perfectly? Maybe it was because he did not quite fit into any other place.

“Fabuloso!” Roland exclaimed softly in the darkness, copying his father’s voice. “Trickery,” he added, uncertain if he were the trickster or the man who was being tricked. This trickery (if it was trickery) not only worked inside Roland’s overcrowded, argumentative head – it seemed to work remarkably well for him in the outside world as well.

Mr Hudson set a cardboard box on his desk, blinking at Roland in a judicial way as he did so. For some reason this single glance entirely changed Roland’s mood. He knew at once that he was not going to be praised, something he had been anticipating. Whatever it was that had caused Mr Hudson to hold him back from midday break was being heralded by an expression of disapproval – even, Roland realised incredulously, of contempt.

Flicking the box open, Mr Hudson thrust his left hand into it with the confidence of a conjuror who knows he is going to whisk a rabbit from an empty hat. He drew out, not a rabbit, but a plastic packet containing three fine-tipped pens – red, green and blue – which he set down in front of Roland with grim deliberation. Plunging his hand into the box for a second and then a third time he brought out something in a greasy paper bag, and finally a thick notebook with a red cover.