…
Dr. _____ had suggested an alienist, but I’d reconciled myself to seeking an alchemist off the High Street. So, after the impotence of waiting for morning, I set out from my sleeping family. I need venture, by foot in sensible low heels, down an awfully crooked back street to this haven of hope near avenue’s end, where I recalled the girl had pointed out a week ago. The house had, since I’d first seen it, acquired a helpful sign though simple: “Alchemy,” it read.
The morning mist was clearing, but my own haze was coming on. I welcomed the familiarity of this, although I would need to be its master for however long this might take.
When had I last looked at my own hands? My gloves were there, but my wrists appeared diaphanous. How fickle the fates now that I sought help! Yes, I must present some solidity; but I felt a fluxlike state would serve me even better, and my condition might be discerned without giving forth a surplus of words.
…For had he not said the very words but hours ago: Not looking for you is as impossible for me now as your truly being seen? Taking the meaning, I got how I get, the evening ruined and all, and that was that. But my husband’s words had convinced me and I’d had all night since to align some facts in my sleepless head.
I was greeted on the stoop of the decrepit shop (or house) by a fugue … or was it real? This thing. Its qualities were that of a tentacular spray of red from a bulbous but furry-black blob. Fancy I expected it to scurry! I might even have to leap unladylike over this–this “spidery splatch.”
I turned my back to it, whispering. And marveled: the back street I was on wasn’t very crooked or crazy after all. But seeming is everything, I like to say. Neither were my shoes the worse for wear, and what I’d imagined as a row of delicate eaves, a few tilting lordly over half the road, as if to shun their fellows, well, all seemed remarkably different; practically normal. A couple of stragglers were about … people, I mean. I must not be seen. Then, on some feeling of disgust, I turned back around, my head bent low, and I heard myself say—
“Hurry, you furry – scurry!”
This to the creature. And to my astonishment, it did! I knew not what it was, nor should I ever but for what it resembled. It had no head or legs and scuttled like a carpet remnant into the hedges.
I knocked on the solid wood door.
_____
“Madam, will you come to the point,” said the proprietor, who tended three pots on the gas cookstove. I suppose I’d been rambling.
I continued: “And what point would that be?” I said. “Do you not have a wife? A family? And what are you cooking, another batch of testiness for your meager trade today?” What had I to lose? I had been in some vacillation and perhaps being confrontational would give the world what it demanded.
“I am making gold, if you must know.”
“Well you needn’t, not for me – that is, I…”
“Look here, perhaps if you sit,” he said, kindlier now. And I did, in some bumpy scone of a chair. At least I was not being asked to lie supine.
“I-I’m sorry, terribly. The vapours…,” I managed, but my heart leapt. Could this mission already be working? What could he tell, or not? Knowing myself manifest to him in my attire, I opened my eyes but used the silence of my swoon to take in my surrounds: an upholstered settee, armchair … and a walnut mantel; and near the mantel a bench equipped with bottles, glass plates, a tripod, and a long box as if for developing photographs.
He had sat down and folded his ageing hands. “Yes, do forgive. And so, my dear, what shall it be? Rather, what need happen for you?”
It took me some time to explain. “I was born a ghost, I’m convinced. And it was a ghost-child, an apparition, that pointed out your home here while on a carriage ride one day with … with my loved ones.”
Already the chair was changing, the bumps now but lumps. I settled into it and was grateful to tell my story:
“I was the middle child of nine. I learned to thrive on inattention. Then the thing happened which brought notice – yes, the moon came to visit. I was 14. It has tried to make me into something else, and I’ve resisted.”
The man was steady but wetter in his eyes.
“Then I was delivered of a baby, and forced to marry. Now that I’ve known love, I am expected to host and to shine some ghastly light. I was made even more real-feeling and I don’t know if I shall ever take to it. So I have moved again into the shadow. Only my husband knows where, knows how to look at me. He tries to perceive but – oh, he is a sorcerer! He has my soul but wants me whole. I have tried. He … they all, they give me things. The things anyone can suggest.
“Everything merely becomes distorted. But I refused their laudanum last night; a ghost should always be awake. Only someone such as you might know how to reverse this worsening process, Mister…? But you haven’t said, have you?”
“Er, Appley is my name.”
It rang of a half-truth; there was something I did not know…
“Oh, Mister Appley, help me fade, make me a ghost again. The common lot hurts me all too much and I am already delicate. I crave the spectral. When I was fully such I was rational and knew secrets. I watched everyone from corners and cellars and upper rooms. I loved with vibrations, if that doesn’t sound too strange.
“But I became too bound to them, to whomever I contact. I wish to vanish before they all do one day. I must go back. From one state to the previous one. Something’s confusing all, and all’s unfair. Can you unbirth me, Doctor?”
“My child, even an unschooled fellow like me can tell you’re a fantasist. When one is neglected…”
I gave the slightest pause. “Yes, you know – I can see you do! … Times, they were hard, for everyone. My mother— When the change came, I learned it was not always respected, but expected as a dread thing and seen to with bare tolerance. Since then I’ve had to struggle.”
“And you lost heart.”
“No, I’m trying, trying to find it again.” I was becoming hysterical. “Or perhaps I’ve not really possessed it, perhaps you’re right. But I want it back whatever it is called. It is protection, it
is—”
“I’m afraid I don’t—”
“No one does, don’t you see… There are two worlds I must inhabit. Two uninhabitable worlds.”
A certain look came to those eyes, as if he were at ease with some knowledge. “I was only going to say I don’t think the answer is to disappear. My dear, I cannot, as you put it, ‘unbirth’ you. … However, as Samuel Johnson said, ‘a chymist is locally at rest; but his mind is hard at work.’ Er, … you speak of the others, your … husband? And there is a baby?”
“She’s nearly two now,” I told him. His eyes, did they twinkle?
He bade me sit nearer to him. He brought tea as I lay my head on a center settee in that front room; again, first foreign then accommodating, comfortable. It was odd indeed. As if the very atmosphere was in change. The windows showed a clearing outside. And had I imagined there’d been a stove? I knew nothing of alchemy, but it felt something like it must surely be occurring.
Presently, the man acquired an inquisitive look and said, “Pardon me, ma’am, but I wonder: did I hear you speak to someone at the stoop?” He took a sip of his tea.
“Frightful! … That is, it was nothing.” For I knew now what the figment had been. I heard him chuckle softly.
“No, no. And you are safe, Mrs. Alston. We have mentioned hearts, have we not? Well now, I think you take after my own…”
“Oh! Sir, your eyes … they warm me.” I then demurred. “Surely the tea,” I mumbled, “for which I am grateful. And it is different from the look of a husband. Are–are you really an alchemist? Or rather, er, what sort?”
“Only recently am I embarked on that natural course. My own way of ‘going back,’ as you spoke of.” He paused; then as if to himself: “The theorists smile at my ideas, but they’ve yet to venture to effect the real changes needed.”
Then he was back with me.
“Forty-seven years ago I too was born in the middle,” he went on. “I married young and my wife gave us the nine you speak of. This may shock… The fifth child, a girl, we lost when she was 15. She ran away.”
He hadn’t paused, and neither did I give away anything.
“A fortnight ago, with the help of a customer, a mystic crone, I summoned you. —It is you, isn’t it, Selina?”
Now I sat up in my seat.
He enjoined: “And did the wraith, the conjured thing who pointed you to this place, resemble yourself??”
“Why, yes!” I uttered. “She seemed familiar, and I have hardly looked in a mirror since that age. They’d always put me off. But if you’re my fath— ”
“But so negligent a father,” he interrupted, “when you were 14! For that I can only offer insufficient apology. She, your mother Maud, was hardly any better, bless her soul. You’re correct, there were difficulties. Alas, she died of consumption, poor thing, just two years ago.”
“Oh, father!” We stood and heartily embraced. “But the stoop … the vision…” This may be amusing, I thought.
But of course he had conjured nothing of the sort, nor had any crone. My father, indeed my own Richard Appleton, pointed me in the right direction:
“One of your elder sisters, you remember ‘Charity,’ lives nearby and you must be reunited with her. She will surely speak to you in the women’s way and be interested to learn what has happened to you.”
He was blushing, oh why did I think it sweet?
“In fact, a couple of other family members are to be found not too far,” he effused. “I shall even look forward to leaving my hermitage now and then…!”
I was afraid he might jump about his room now in this thrall.
In her, then, in Charity I would dare to put it forth that the pelt-creature on the stoop was but a false photograph from my mind of what I had come to condemn. She would hear the effect of all on the years since (perhaps she’d had her own unease to pass through). A sisterly chat was suddenly a rapturous thing to consider. And to think I need stay a “ghost” no longer if the crucible of physical and social realities were truly there for me and I had some help being fitted into them.
For the rest of the morning till noontime Daddy and I talked. He told me of the years I’d missed as I walked in and out of the lives and houses of an assortment of folk. Never haunting, not intentionally. I wept when hearing more of my mother.
To step out with him to a local café was a trembly affair at first, but his was a blessed comfort.
“In absence there is always presence too,” he said, well into his pint. “No alembic needed, dear Selina. Your spirit is genuine, as are your emotions. And you have come into what I should perhaps market as a bodyfelt salvation, hah! Probably help business…”
He had spoken his secrets – his fatherhood of me as well as his own heart. I was proud of him, of his life after my absconding with what I held somehow too dear for survival.
We were walking along the street, and I stopped. “But mostly,” I declared, “you have been an alchemist of the heart. ‘Dear sir’…” And grinning, I went close and kissed his cheek.
_____
When back from our outing, we placed a message for my husband that I had run away for the last time, and would soon be home.
Daddy and I looked through some photographs of my brothers and sisters, my mother and father, myself. He was careful not to unnecessarily stimulate my emotions with these. He told me, “As all these photos will in time, all things are to fade. But I held you strong in my memory.” He regarded the photo album again. “Your mother was very watchful. But I heard her surmise once that the more distanced our eyes and mind, the more meaningless and detached from reality. Mightn’t I have asked her what she meant?”
Among those pictures was one that exceedingly resembled the child-wraith I’d seen. I then understood the cameras, et cetera, by the mantel had belonged to my mother. How dear of him to have them at hand. I felt my alchemist was indeed a synthesist.
Looking at my wan face in the overexposed scene, I spoke slowly, calmly. “The safety of being a remnant. But the shifting … the foreground, background.”
“Indeed. A ghost can linger till something is resolved. What to say of ghosts – quiet observers of this world often go unnoticed. They can potentially impact their environment, but not change it. And they always need help when it comes to changing themselves.”
“Father, no matter how hard I tried to lose myself, I was stuck with me. And now I’m stuck with you!” I teased.
Afterwards, he would walk me, over those cobbled roads, back to my home, my husband, and the little girl who would need me. I myself would need help in embodying this life, and might even channel my natural spiritualism into something helpful or creative. In this life.