Chapter 9 - Flowers of Antimony
“Well the whole thing, start to finish, takes 40 days. And the first thing we need is a horse womb.”
Need to catch up? Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4 - Chapter 5 - Chapter 6 - Chapter 7 - Chapter 8
Please note that there are subjects and themes in this book that some readers might prefer to approach with forewarning, or not at all. These include relationship trauma, self-harm, suicide, death/dying, swearing, and sexual content.
When they relocated to the basement, they brought with them glasses of water and several tangerines. Seated at the card table once again, the previous evening was almost perfectly reconstructed.
“What do you know about the homunculus?” Leon started, pulling two books from the stack toward him and finding a specific page within each.
Rosalie opened her own notebook to the last page, where she’d detailed everything she could in accordance with Leon’s earlier request. Through the research, she’d found only limited information about a fifth element, so there weren’t many notes.
“How did they describe it in the books…a pure spirit with a mortal form? Or, in other words, miniature human created by alchemy. I didn’t find a formula for it in the books you gave me, but I did find a passage talking about how the formula for one deviates from most processes. Roughly translated, from Werner, page 26, ‘the homunculus is one not satisfied by our four universal components. It asks of the alchemist an elusive fifth. A secret must be given up. Shed light on your soul. Shed light on creation.’ Blah blah. Does that mean anything to you?”
Leon mumbled the translation to himself, moving to the chair next to her so he could read straight from her notes.
“Maybe? We need to define this fifth element. I believe it’s what made the transmutation possible. It sure as hell wasn’t the zinc oxide, or the water, or the red lilies. You know that staple medieval text, the one with the anonymous author?”
“The Glass of Alchemy?”
“That’s it. Well, the chart that we sometimes use is in there. Except it’s different. There are the normal columns for earth, air, fire, water, but then there’s a fifth column. It’s labeled for spirit, but…it’s empty. It doesn’t list any classes or categories of reagents. So we’re in the dark. Elusive,” Leon said, biting down on the word with frustration.
Rosalie pondered that in silence, pressing the capped pen she was holding between her lips, against her teeth.
“Spirit- as an element, a class of reagents. Hm. Well, we know that a promise fits, right? After all, that’s the only part of the transmutation formula that doesn’t belong with the other elements.”
“But…what else? I have a feeling a promise isn’t going to be the key to every alchemical miracle. That’d be too easy.”
“Something intangible. Something…immaterial,” Rosalie considered before Leon interrupted her.
“Those are the same thing.”
“Shh. I’m thinking.” Rosalie waved her pen at him, then stuck it back between her lips. “In this passage there are several intangible things referenced. Okay? Secrets. The soul. Creation…I don’t know. I have no idea how you’d put creation into a formula. Or the soul. But, a secret…?”
“That’s kind of like a promise,” Leon said, excitement speeding up his speech as he turned back to the books.
“What are you looking for?”
“That word. In the original formula. What’s the Latin?”
“In the book you gave me, Werner, it’s ‘obcultus,’ but let me see this original formula. There are, like, 33 different ways to say ‘secret’ in Latin, so- ah- ‘absconditum.’ There. It’s not listed in with the reagents. It’s in the process, though.”
“What’s the difference between ‘obcultus’ and ‘absconditum’? Is that important?”
“Ehhh, ‘obcultus,’ from your reference material, is an adjective. So that process is implying working with something hard to see. ‘Absconditum,’ from my reference material, is a noun, and it implies something that was deliberately taken away and hidden. More like our modern and simple understanding of a secret. Leon, it sounds like a secret is the thing.
“The authors were being tricky. In your formula there, they made the secret reference sound like it was part of the philosophy of alchemy rather than a real part of the process. But we know that you can add these intangibles to a formula and get something.”
Rosalie let her hopes bubble up, but Leon wasn’t looking terribly convinced.
“I suppose. But this feels like shaky logic. And if we get this wrong, it could be an entire month before we know we’ve messed it up, and then months yet before we have all the ingredients again.”
“What? Why?”
“You never looked up what this procedure calls for?” Leon asked, leaning back and resting an arm on his folding chair.
“Na-uh. I didn’t realize we were going to try all of the magical, mystical stuff. Tell me?” Rosalie popped the cap off her pen to take notes on a fresh page of her book.
“Well the whole thing, start to finish, takes 40 days. And the first thing we need is a horse womb.”
“Uh. Inside the horse? Or…removed from?”
“It’s not clear.”
“Awesome. Okay, then what?”
“Well, inside of the womb goes a squash. A ‘cucurbit’ if you’re a stickler for the terminology. A pumpkin, or melon, et cetera.”
As Rosalie built a mental image of the experiment, she shivered. It was all sounding very…sticky.
“Let me guess…something goes inside the squash?” she asked.
“Yeah. ‘Seed of man.’”
Rosalie squinted. “Is that like…king’s yellow, or philosopher’s wool, or flowers of antimony? Fanciful name, simple ingredient?”
Leon stared at her. His expression wavered between disbelief and amusement.
“No. No. Semen, actually. It’s literal.”
“Gross. Anyway, I assume it’s the horse womb that’s hard to obtain.”
“Not that hard. I mean, I have it already.”
Rosalie burst out with a surprised laugh and scoffed if only to keep from drowning in horror. “Sorry. Christ. Where the hell did you get a horse womb? And oh my God, where are you keeping it?”
“Network. The twins, of course. They have a horse farm- or whatever you call it when you keep horses around for riding, not for food. A few months ago I asked them to put one on ice for me if any of their stock died. They’ll ship it by air as soon as I make the call.”
“Okay, I see the challenge here. But, all we have to do is ask them to start saving more and hope they have a bunch of old horses, just in case we’ve got it wrong? Everything else on the shopping list is simple! Well, I’m assuming that, thanks to the internet, it shouldn’t be too hard to get our hands on- sorry, it shouldn’t be hard for us to obtain semen-”
“Actually,” Leon interrupted. “We should talk about that. I want us to use mine.”
The necklace Leon had given Rosalie suddenly felt very heavy on her neck. She reached for it with her free hand and felt the slick metal between her thumb and middle finger.
“Leon. I have an objection,” Rosalie said very slowly. It was as much in an effort not to alarm him as it was for her to keep her composure. Everything had been going smoothly, but this wrench in the works felt all wrong. Leon didn’t say anything for a moment, but he met her eyes without a trace of empathy. His body language was tense: back straight, hands still, a slight tilt to his head and an expression that was inscrutable. Rosalie recognized the telltale signs.
This was a hill that Leon was prepared to fight and die on.
“Hear me out?” he asked.
You’re trying. Don’t forget you’re trying. Give him a chance, Rosalie coached herself, finally nodding.
“One: quality control. Unless you want to hire someone to supply this particular ingredient, it doesn’t get any more unspoiled than, uh, this,” he began, gesturing to his entire body. “Than me, rather. Anything we find on the Internet will have been frozen, possibly altered for the sake of preservation. Two: I find it morally objectionable. I’m pretty sure someone giving their sperm over to a bank assumes it’s going to be used to create new life. I’m not entirely confident that’s what we’re doing. Tiny human, sure. But as far as I’m concerned it’s only half a human without the female component involved. And three: I’d prefer to take responsibility for this. Whatever comes of it.”
Over the course of Leon’s little speech, Rosalie retreated under increments of dread. He was right. Those were decent points, but they didn’t change how ill the thought of it made her. She grabbed one of the tangerines to take some of the focus away from that queasy feeling in her stomach. It didn’t work. Rosalie groaned.
“Okay. Okay. Granted. But can I just say that I have a bad feeling about this? Some of it is the fact that I don’t want any part of you to be a part of this. The whole homunculus thing freaked me out a bit to begin with, but now knowing that actual, literal sexual fluids are a part of it? Ugh. Call me jealous if you like, but I’m just not crazy about you impregnating a pumpkin inside a horse.”
Leon burst out laughing, breaking some of the tension between them. Rosalie didn’t have it in her to laugh along. She offered him a segment of tangerine, which he took only after the brief fit had passed.
“It’ll be clinical, Rosie. I promise. I’m not going to stick anything into a vegetable other than a sterilized syringe.”
“Cucurbit,” Rosalie corrected miserably. “You’re promising not to fuck a cucurbit. God help us.”
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