The half hour it takes for us to race through the streets of Serien, leaping over its many canals, bridges, boats, and slumbering cargo, is a mere blur to me. Before we know it, we stand on the second-floor landing of a small and narrow apartment complex by the address given to us as the doctor’s residence.
A knock on the door by Jules.
A furious knock on the door by myself with such intensity that a neighbor’s door opens.
“Would you shut it up? It’s 6:40 in the freaking morning!” the old woman in pajamas hollers, slamming her door shut again.
No answer. I sigh, clutching my head, nearly collapsing the floor.
“What’d we do now?” I ask Jules. His lips are pursed, deep in thought, calculating.
But just then, a slam shut on the apartment entrance below. I notice a shadow drape past the light of the faintly rising sun, and hear thuds on the staircases. I leap down, heedless of Jules, and run into the figure of a curly gray beard and fading gray hair, bespectacled in round glasses.
“Dr. Louis!”
He is so surprised by my sudden appearance that he lets go of various fabric bags holding alchemical instruments and bottles of liquid. Some slide down while a bottle breaks in splatters on the staircase. He makes a loud swear.
“BY THE FOUNDERS,” he exclaims, clutching his heart, “do you know what you’ve done? I needed that bottle! What kind of freaking imbecile do you need to be to pounce on a stranger at an unholy hour like – wait,” he pauses, doing a double-take, “you are – you are that Miss, aren’t you?”
“I am. Amelie. Amelie Marceau. I – we need to talk to you, right now.”
“Ms. Minerva?”
“Yes, yes, it’s about René!”
His eyes grow wide. The doctor unlocks his door, fumbling, and shoves it open. As we enter, he drapes a green curtain surreptitiously upon an alchemical setup bubbling and boiling still. He extinguishes the fire underneath.
“Tell me. Tell me everything,” he says, holding up an index finger. “The important first.”
“Minerva is poisoning René. We have to give him an antidote. As fast as possible.”
“What?” Dr. Louis sputters. “You’re accusing her of poisoning him? Do you have any evidence?”
“Yes,” answers Jules, taking out a vial of Minerva’s tea still remaining and uncorking it. “You can analyze it all you want to make the antidote, but you’ve got to hurry. And fast.” At the mention of the word antidote, the Doctor makes a brief, tenth-of-a-second glance towards the alchemical apparatuses beyond the green curtain. I don’t think Jules noticed, but in my hyperconscious-state where I can feel everything right and wrong about the world thanks to Eisen, it makes my heart lurch.
“Well, I’ll see what I can do...” says the doctor, trailing off.
“It’s not what you can do. You must do it!” I exclaim. “René’s life hangs on you! Where have you been the last three weeks?”
“My fault, my fault!” The Doctor shouts, hurriedly taking the test vial to the adjoining laboratory.
“I have experience. Just tell me what you need,” relays Jules, taking off his coat.
We follow the doctor to his indoor laboratory, but just as we’re about to cross the threshold, he motions us no closer. “No shoes in the lab! Take those off. And your coat off, unless you want your face burned,” he says to me, despite still wearing his shoes, rushing into the lab and taking various beakers and cups into the cupboard instead of placing them out. And as we fumble to take the shoes off, I by the corner of my eye spy a set of stoichiometric papers, draped in black, crumbling and flaking off in the morning sun by the windowsill.
“What’re those?”
“What?”
“What’re those?” I ask again, pointing, finding their place wrong for a reason I cannot articulate.
“They’re called stoichiometric papers. We use them to test poison,” he comments without special attention, unrolling his coat and throwing it to the floor on the far side of the laboratory.
“What poison?”
The doctor ignores me as he hands Jules a couple of beakers. “This one there, the smaller one – here. Pour these with half a teaspoon of water. We’re going to test the vial and know what poison it is. You how it goes, yes?” He enunciates rapidly.
“I already did. It’s varuviere toxins.”
“Varuv – Varuviere?” the Doctor stammers momentarily.
“We can check it again right now.” Jules strides over and notices the blackened stoichiometric papers himself. “Do you have anything other than these?” he asks, holding them up, trying to see if there’s a small piece of yellow on the edges that they could still use.
“Yes,” says the Doctor, snatching them away. Jules looks at him quizzically. “Look by the second drawer,” he says, scrunching them up and throwing them into the refuse cans.
“Jules,” I whisper, “can you show him the stoichiometric papers? The ones that we used ourselves?”
“Good idea, we can compare them that way,” he replies, fishing out the blackened papers from his satchel. He takes them out and is about to stride over to the doctor, but I stop him by his wrist.
“Amelie? What? What’s going on?”
“Wait...” I trail off, examining the shade of black on our stochiometric papers. It is a distinct hue of black, mixed with a tint of plum and umber-brown. Catching the falling rays of the morning sun at an angle, it gives off a prismatic display of colors, making polygons on the surface of the paper that I see with my eyes. I would not have been able to discern any of this, but the heavy dose of Eisen I’ve taken the past few days are persisting their effects in tandem with my throbbing head.
“The same hue...” I murmur, as I fish out the crumpled pieces of the Doctor’s stoichiometric papers from the refuse cans. I compare them together. They are the exact same hue and tint.
“Dr. Louis,” I mutter, “what did you test your papers for?”
“What?” he shoots back in an irritable tone of voice, calibrating the burner. He nicks his hand in the minute flame, and yelps. “Jules, was it? Can you take Miss Amelie outside, please? She’s slowing things down.”
Jules stands, puzzled slightly.
“What do you mean, Amelie?”
“The hue. The papers. Exact same shade,” I repeat, putting them side by side for Jules to see.
“Huh, you’re right,” Jules murmurs, stopping halfway from putting on his gloves. He also realizes something is odd. There’s too many beakers and alchemical apparatus for someone whose title is a traveling doctor. This laboratory – come to think of it – is fit for an apothecary, not a doctor, a traveling one at that.
“Dr. Louis, how often do you test for poisons?” asks Jules.
“For occasions that require me to. What? We’re out of time and you’re asking for my schedule?”
I notice steam arising out of the green curtain draped over other apparatuses outside. I unfold it to see vials of a green-deep liquid bubbling away by the side, with a corked vial of something that looked like tea –
“Hey! MISS! No touching stuff that doesn’t belong to you!”
The tea is the same shade as the one in the vial we have. I uncork it and smell it. And that’s when it hits.
The same sweet fragrance of the tea that Minerva’s been serving Manfred.
“Hey – hey Jules! This is the same tea that’s –”
With a sudden bang and blast, Jules knocks over on the ground, out cold.
The Doctor shuts the blinders.
“Damn it! DAMN YOU! You just have to poke your nose in places you don’t belong, don’t you?” He screams, advancing towards me. I instinctively make for the door, but it is locked from the outside.
“Don’t tell me you’re in league with her – you – the poison – this is your doing? Minerva doesn’t know?”
“Oh, shut up, you Maestro,” the Doctor swears, unsheathing a scalpel from his coat pocket. “You think I’m in league with that rich crone?”
“Then why’re you being defensive? You have something to lose,” I retort.
“Yes, because I’ve been making the antidote for René all along. It’s what pays my bills. And now you’ve shoved me into a situation where I have to explain all this or otherwise I’m mistaken as the one that poisoned that blasted boy!” He hollers, throwing a beaker towards me. It shatters by the plastered wall.
“You’ve had the antidote all along? Then what in the Naraks have you been doing with it instead of saving him?”
“I have been saving him, you idiot Dream Merchant. You noticed that I haven’t been able to visit since 3 weeks ago. René’s condition worsened in those 3 weeks. Perhaps you can make the connection?”
“What...?” I ask. “You – you were keeping him alive? But how hasn’t he healed?”
“The same reason as you do.”
“What reason?”
“Are you this imbecilic or are you deliberately trying to get on my nerves?” Dr. Louis screams.
Then it hits me like a carriage. There is no profit in healing René – Manfred – completely. Because as soon as he heals and gets better again, it means the doctor’s services won’t be needed anymore.
If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
“And just as I’ve scrounged enough bottles to deliver another batch, you two show up,” he swears, hoicking a good spit into the refuse can next to him.
“You – you knew about the poison all along! You knew Minerva was poisoning him! And you didn’t bring Manfred to safety!”
“Of course I didn’t, I’m not an idiot! What do you think happens if I do?”
“MANFRED CANNOT WALK!” I roar, indignant.
“Who in the Raks is Manfred?!”
“René!”
“That’s what he’s – forget it. You didn’t hear any of this, understand?”
“I’ve heard everything! You – you knew about the poison all along as a doctor, someone who’s supposed to heal and save lives, and you let this go on for – for – for 3 years! Just so you can live off them like a parasite! YOU SHOULD HAVE SAVED MANFRED AND REPORTED MINERVA RIGHT AWAY!”
“Maybe this goes over your head, but have you seen her? Have you seen her talk about her son? I’ve seen her mix the calcophout flowers into the tea, have asked her about why she does it! And you know what she told me?”
“What?”
“That it’s something she’s always done when making tea. I’ve asked her why she doesn’t do it to her own teapot then. And do you know what she replied with?”
“That –”
“That it’s to make René feel better, and she herself doesn’t deserve such a rare ingredient. You should have seen her eyes. She said it with such nonchalance that I could not believe what I was hearing.”
“Oh, then you used it as an opportunity to take advantage of her illness? Her and René’s?” I holler back, indignant.
“I told her it was poison! I told her it would make René feel sick! But she didn’t believe it. She told me that if I was that bad, mistaking the sweet flower for something so poisonous, then perhaps she should get a better doctor.”
“You coward,” I spit. “All I hear is excuses to live off their backs. IF YOU ARE A DOCTOR AS YOU SAY, YOU SHOULD HAVE REPORTED HER RIGHT AWAY!”
“AND WHAT DOES THAT MAKE ME?” The doctor hollers, pounding his heart. “What does that make me? She will insist I’m in the wrong, that I’m a false doctor, and fire me, implicate me as the one who’s doing the poisoning! She will deny poisoning her son herself! Do you know how precarious of a situation I was in? One flick of the finger just like that, and it will be ‘he said,’ ‘she said’ at the courts, and the jury will see me as the one having thought of such a scheme and accuse me of trying to hijack the Cartier family fortune! For all their idiot brains, they hear the word ‘doctor’ and equate it to alchemist and poisoner!”
“But why is she poisoning René then?”
“It’s all too obvious! It’s so that she doesn’t bleed inheritance! If René dies, she gets to keep all of her husband’s wealth to herself! She’s a widow, that much you know!”
“You're wrong,” I say, shaking my head. The real René was already dead. I witnessed it in Minerva's deepest memories as my soul was being torn to shreds. “Minerva’s not such a person. She loved René.”
“Love can be pretended. You’re an idiot for believing in everything you see, when you are a creator of illusions yourself, Dream Merchant!”
“You are an archon-damned DOCTOR!” I roar, rushing at him at such speed that he he’s taken aback. I groan and push him onto the wall. “Doctors are supposed to heal. They swear oaths to save lives. You have the gall to tell me you are anything but a CROOK?” I rattle him by his lapel.
“I am a HUMAN TOO!” He screams, prying my hands off his lapel with fury. “I HAVE DUES I NEED TO PAY TO THE BLOODS!” He froths at the mouth. “You think I don’t have children? I have two daughters. They’re only toddlers. I need to pay my dues or the Syndicate will kill me or them both. They’ll be chucked into those workhouses or better yet, I will have NOTHING to call FAMILY! Every time I visit René I see my daughter’s eyes in his! But I can avoid it precariously month after month as long as I keep supplying the archon-damned rich whatever fantasy they want, poison or not!”
“That could’ve been yours to stop,” I exclaim, incensed. “To nip it in the bud before it bloomed like a rose from a corpse! You knew all the way from the beginning, and you planned it all out, living like a parasite and mosquito, sucking all the blood dry just because her pockets are deep!”
“Parasite? PARASITE! Ha – Haha! Hahaha! What does that make you, Dream Merchant? What does that make you? You are the exact same as me. You enjoy the Denaros you receive from her! Just like me, you sell a service of assurance, and just like me, you take advantage of the rich who can’t tell the difference between what’s sound and what’s absurd! We both sell DREAMS! And we sell them because we must, because we have our own lives to live!”
He throws me off him and stumbles to a table, grabbing a disinfecting bottle and smashing it by the side of the table. He points it at me, advancing.
“WE ARE NOTHING ALIKE!” I issue a hoarse scream, taking my coat and wrapping it around my arm. “YOU KNEW THE TRUTH FROM THE BEGINNING, AND DIDN’T TELL. I DIDN’T KNOW ANYTHING!”
“And now that you know,” he rambles, “what’re you doing to do about it? Tell the madam? Save her? Save her blithering adopted son? You’re still going to visit. You’ve been there all since the start of spring. You think you can change what currently is? You report this to the councils, and I’m going to tell them you were in on it too. I’m taking you down with me. After all, you are an undergrounder. Better yet, the madam will be convicted and tried. And her son will be chucked into an orphanage. With his ailing health, he’s going to die quicker than most! So what seems fair to you? Do you see reason? Just keep this up so the madam will be happy, that her son will get to live, both of us can afford more spoons at meals, and nothing has to go wrong! Don’t you get it? This is the BEST CHOICE!”
“THIS ISN’T THE BEST CHOICE!” I shout, throwing a chair in his direction. It catches his elbow as he makes a loud groan. “No one should live to suffer without their knowledge!”
“SO THINK WE ALL!” The doctor hoarsely screams, pounding his chest. “SO THINK WE ALL! BUT THIS WORLD IS DAMNED! THIS WORLD IS UNJUST! IT CARES NEVER TO US WHO CRY AND IMPLORE! SO WE HAVE TO MAKE CHOICES ON WHAT TO KEEP OR WHAT TO LET GO! IS THAT SUCH A HARD CONCEPT! THAT’S HOW WE KEEP MOVING FORWARD, LEST WE CHOOSE DEATH FOR OURSELVES! AND HEAR ME! I WANT TO BE GONE TOO! I ONCE HAD DREAMS TOO! I ONCE HAD A LOVE OF MY LIFE! BUT SHE’S GONE BECAUSE OF THE BLOODS, AND I CAN’T DIE BECAUSE MY CHILDREN NEED ME! THAT’S HOW I AM CURSED TO LIVE ON THIS WRETCHED, WRETCHED EARTH!” He pounds his fists and wine bottle onto table until the wood dents and glass shatters.
“And if you dare report me – no, you are going to report me, because you simply don’t get it – I’m – I’m going to kill you,” he stammers, taking a vial from his pocket and pulling the liquid into a syringe with a needle with shaky hands. “This world has no fairness... I have to make it fair for those I love,” he says, mortally afraid of having to kill another – to kill me. He shuffles towards me, arms raised with the syringe, intending to bring it down.
I shuffle away, but find nowhere to run. It is then and there that a mortal fear also grips me – I’d never considered myself weak or unable, and drowned in the fury for my search for the truth, I’d ignored into what dangers I’d put myself. In this very room at this very moment, I am utterly powerless.
“I’m sorry... I’M SORRY!” He shouts, bringing it down upon my chest.
But up bursts Jules from the floor. He tackles the doctor and roll away, engaging in a furious struggle of grunts and pained screams.
The doctor stabs Jules momentarily in the thigh – but before he can push with full force the liquid content from the syringe, I kick the syringe away and step on his hands. Jules holds him down, but with a free hand not bound the doctor unsheathes another scalpel from his coat pocket and stabs him in the shoulder, making Jules issue a hoarse scream; he reels backwards, the doctor stands, and nicks my cheek with an erratic cut, kicking me into the wall where I reel. The doctor strides like a crazed man towards me, but Jules grabs his legs and makes him fall – I step upon his wrists and kick the scalpel away, wasting no moment to drive down the air which pins him to the floor. Jules rips off a portion of his shirt and ties the doctor’s still struggling hands behind his back – but the doctor scratches his hands and wrists with bloodied fury, drawing droplets of crimson, headbutting him from behind and rising up again. He reaches for the scalpel at the corner of the room, but I reach it first – I duck out from his grip, a portion of my hair torn out in his grip to which I shriek, and shakily hold the scalpel in front of me, my eyes bulging, with his own the same underneath his broken spectacles.
“WAIT!” Jules shouts hoarsely, holding out his hand, kicking an armchair between us two still standing. “WAIT. NO MORE. No more. No more. None of us has to die. None of us has to die. It’s monumentally stupid for us to die like this. None of us will get what we want.”
“SPEAK FOR YOURSELF! I’LL GET MINE!” The doctor retorts, shuffling his gaze back to -
“WAIT! I SAID!” Jules roars in agony and anger so loud the windows rattle. “Then – then you’ll become a murderer.”
“I MAY AS ALREADY BE!”
“Your two daughters,” I plead. “You can’t kill me, or him, and get away with it. You’re outnumbered, and even if you do, your conscience won’t let you stay the same. You’re in no position to negotiate, so hear him out. Taken by the council, the ministers, you’re still out of luck. Your greatest fear is going to come true. So hear him out,” I deliver in raspy breaths, enunciating with a speed so fast that it must’ve barely taken a second.
Jules continues, still panting. “None – none of this – happened. It’s the only way.”
Absolutely not, I want to retort. But if we keep going like this, then Manfred will never be able to...
“None of this happened? Are you out of your mind?” spits the doctor. “You expect me to believe you that you won’t report me to the council?”
“Yes,” Jules answers curtly. “Because we are not stupid. Right, Amelie?”
I ponder over. What the doctor said was right. If I report the doctor, then the truth behind Minerva and her son will come to light. It was a certainty that Minerva would be convicted and thrown in prison. Manfred will mostly certainly be taken back to the orphanage. But could the doctor himself bring us down? He said he would, but where’s the evidence for it? Manfred himself would be able to vouch for me, and so would Minerva, that I did not do anything to harm the two of them in my line of work. Additionally, I joined Minerva much later than the doctor did, so there’s only thin line of reasoning that can effectively connect the two of us being accomplices. I am an undergrounder, yes, skirting the protection of the law in many ways, but a liar and crook unlike this doctor is none of them.
I enunciate my reasoning to the doctor. His expression droops as I speak. He knows that he is the only person in this room without a hand to deal.
“So,” I give my verdict, “here’s what’s going to happen. We are not going to report you. In return, you create more antidote for the poison that Minerva’s been mixing in the tea. And you give this antidote to us. You will then leave René and Minerva alone. You shall visit them no further. Break any of these rules we set, and we will report you immediately no matter what. It’s a small penance to pay for the moral filth you committed in bringing a child nearly to death through willful neglect, trading one innocent life for another.”
“Then you rob my family’s daily bread. I cannot accept.”
“Then find new people with honest work,” I say, emptying my entire pockets of my Denaros and hurling them at him. The doctor tries in vain to catch them mid-air. Jules looks at me as if I’m crazy, but soon understands. “I’m no stranger to your suffering, and don’t want to see your children die, whether you are lying out of your teeth or not. I give you the benefit of the doubt. After you create the antidote, you shall put it in a bottle. I will have you shake this bottle in front of me, and drink it in front of us, so don’t try to pull anything funny. Only after you pass the bottle to us will your duty for the antidote be considered complete.”
With the contents of the bottle, I would deliver it first to Manfred immediately; what’s left over, Jules could analyze, and continue producing more of the antidote on his own. With it, we could slowly nurse Manfred back to health.
“You have until tomorrow. Get to it.”
* * *
A multitude of thoughts race around my mind. There is the issue with Manfred too, but more telling is just why Minerva would do this to her son, adopted or not. It was just too cruel, too demonic, too disgusting. Even if we cured Manfred, would Minerva be better? Would solving the disease bring her happiness?
I call back to the memory of E. J. Greenwood. Manfred was fully healthy when he arrived. And yet, there was no evidence that Minerva was actually genuinely happy in the past 3 years. She purposefully fed him the tea to make him sick. Almost as if Manfred being sick reassured her mental state in a sick, twisted kind of way. But that’s what grief does, I think. She’d never seen her son happy after her husband’s death, and the only memory she has of her true son is that of him being bedridden. Manfred being healthy was an anomaly, one which reminded her that her adopted son wasn’t real. And so she had to...
A nausea catches in my mouth. I have to clasp it with my hands. It couldn’t be. It can’t be.
But at the same time, something else lodges in my throat. It’s that Minerva insisted Manfred was her biological son, almost as if she purged her memories of adopting Manfred, almost as if she had no idea. Something told me it wasn’t premeditated malice that drove Minerva; rather, a sickness in the soul so deep that it even influenced her memories, and made Manfred out to be her true son, and she was poisoning him without realizing it, her mind dismissing it as something which must be done, something which was normal, something she had always done for her son so that she finds no fault in it. It was like an instinct. In such a case, us nursing Manfred back to health with the antidote was likely to be ineffective in the long-run. Manfred would, for fear of abandonment, never leave Minerva’s side. And as soon as we leave, the poisoning would continue, because the world in which Minerva lives right now is not the world she knows, or can even confront. Her soul and dreams are elsewhere, still living in the past. She is shaping reality with her grief without even realizing it.
For everyone to be truly happy, it was Minerva herself who had to be cured. She had to be rescued from her grief which still grips her to this day, unable to let go because abandoning it would mean losing everything she loved.
And in that moment I realized that the dream of immortality that she requested me at the cusp of winter was not for her own son; it was a cry for help for her own self, a dream for herself that her son would be immortal and never had to die.