The Alchemaster's Apprentice

The Alchemaster’s Castle


Although the town of Malaisea contained plenty of weird buildings in which weird things occurred, Alchemaster Ghoolion’s castle and the things that occurred there were the weirdest of all. Erected on a hill in very ancient times, it overlooked the town like an eagle’s eyrie. The whole of Malaisea could be seen from there, just as there wasn’t a single spot in the town exempt from the sight of the creepy castle. It was a perpetual reminder of the Alchemaster’s constant surveillance.

Constructed of black stone said to have been quarried from the depths of the Gloomberg Mountains, the castle was so cockeyed and misshapen that it resembled a monstrous, other-worldly excrescence. There was no glass in any of the windows. Ghoolion didn’t feel the cold, even in the iciest of winters, so he liked it when the wind came whistling through his castle and played on it like a demonic flute. Installed in several of the gloomy window embrasures were some strangely convoluted telescopes through which he could spy on any part of town whenever the fancy took him. It was rumoured in Malaisea that Ghoolion had ground the lenses of those telescopes with such skill that they enabled him to see round corners and through keyholes - even down chimneys.

It seemed almost incredible that such an apparently haphazard heap of masonry hadn’t collapsed at some stage in its many centuries of existence. If you knew that its builders were the same as those who had constructed the Bookemists’ ancient houses in Bookholm’s Darkman Street, however, you realised that this type of architecture was designed to last for ever. The castle had been standing there before a town named Malaisea existed.

Echo was so weak that Ghoolion carried him up the winding streets concealed inside his cloak, where the little Crat had fallen asleep from exhaustion. On reaching the castle, he fished a rusty key from his pocket and opened the massive oak door.

Then, still carrying his featherweight burden, he hurried along a series of passages lit by torches and candles and hung with paintings in dusty wooden frames. The pictures were all of natural disasters: volcanic eruptions and tsunamis, tornadoes and maelstroms, earthquakes, conflagrations and avalanches, all executed in oils with great care and meticulous attention to detail, for disaster-painting was one of Ghoolion’s many talents.

Awaiting him when he entered the next passage were three terrifying figures: a Grim Reaper, a Hazelwitch and a Cyclopean Mummy - three of the most dangerous creatures in Zamonia. The chances of encountering all three in one and the same place were just about as remote as being struck simultaneously by a thunderbolt, an asteroid and a blob of bird shit, but Ghoolion didn’t spare them a single glance; he hurried past them unscathed with his cloak billowing out behind him. Fortunately, they were not only dead but stuffed with great skill, one of the Alchemaster’s numerous hobbies being horrifico-taxidermy, or the mummification and stuffing of horrific life forms of all kinds. Several shadowy corners of his domain were populated by these extremely lifelike-looking creatures. No normal person would have cared to bump into them in the dark, or even in broad daylight and in mummified form, but Ghoolion thoroughly enjoyed their silent company and was always adding new specimens to his collection.

Up a spiral stone staircase he hurried, then through a library of mouldering Bookemistic tomes and across a big room filled with dust-sheeted furniture that looked like an array of bulky ghosts in the flickering candlelight. Next came a deserted dining room with flocks of Leathermice2 engaged in daring aerobatics below its lofty ceiling. Ignoring those grisly lodgers as well, Ghoolion climbed another flight of stone stairs and came out in a draughty chamber lined with cages of all kinds, from aviaries of bamboo or wire to oak dog kennels and bear cages with bars of polished steel. The higher he went, the fiercer the gale that blew in through the window embrasures, making the curtains flap incessantly and stirring up whirlwinds of dust. Every now and then the chimneys emitted moans and howls suggestive of mastiffs being tortured to death in a dungeon.

Ghoolion came eventually to a stone doorway engraved with alchemistic symbols: the entrance to the big laboratory in which he spent most of his time. This, so rumour had it, was where he generated the bad weather that so often prevailed in Malaisea, and where he bred the bacteria and viruses with which he contaminated the local wells, causing influenza epidemics and children’s ailments, whooping cough and nettle-rash. Here stood sacks filled with migraine- and nightmare-inducing pollen from poisonous plants, ready to be sprinkled on the town from the castle windows. Here Ghoolion thought up curses and created Leyden Manikins, purely in order to torture them. Here, too, he composed the ghastly music that issued from his castle at night, depriving the Malaiseans of sleep and sometimes, even, of their wits. Some became so utterly exhausted, it was said, that they found peace at last by hanging themselves.

For Ghoolion was the town’s de facto ruler. He was its uncrowned tyrant, its black heart and sick brain. And its mayor. All the town councillors and all the inhabitants of Malaisea were merely puppets dangling from strings operated by the Alchemaster-in-Chief.