The Alchemist's Shadow Read online

  Dedication

  For David, for MiNa;

  and, as always, for my daughter.

  Epigraph

  “Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness.”

  —H. P. Lovecraft

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  One: The Rightful Heirs

  Two: What a Mess

  Three: Guests, Some Welcome, Some Not

  Four: A Change in Atmosphere

  Five: Enter the Labyrinth

  Six: New Enemies

  Seven: Old Friends

  Eight: Agatha

  Nine: Algernon and the Unfortunate Pig

  Ten: The Wire

  Eleven: The Fever and Frederick Five

  Twelve: The Truth About Kenzo

  Thirteen: Clam Cakes

  Fourteen: Balance

  Fifteen: The Alchemist’s Shadow

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  “What took you so long?” the old man croaked, and Bedelia Graves stepped into the darkened study. Her employer was sitting in his wheelchair just outside a shaft of light from the hallway—his withered frame a lump of shadow in the gloom.

  “My apologies, sir,” said Ms. Graves. “I didn’t mean to keep you waiting, but Algernon had some trouble falling asleep.”

  “Excited about the move to the States?”

  “No doubt, sir,” said Ms. Graves, dropping her eyes. She was lying. Algernon had had a nightmare—or at least, that was what Ms. Graves assumed. The boy hadn’t spoken in nearly two years, so it was often hard to tell. Nevertheless, of one thing she was certain: Algernon hated the idea of moving to the States.

  But one did not complain to a man like Oscar Snockett.

  “Perhaps it’s that doll of his—that Kenny,” he said. “Never mind the boy’s absurd attachment to such a thing, the smell of it is enough to wake the dead.”

  Ms. Graves could not see the old man’s face in the darkness, but she could tell by the tone of his voice that he was smiling. Ms. Graves nodded and smiled back. True, the fact that a twelve-year-old boy should be attached to “such a thing” was a bit absurd—not to mention, Kenny did smell like sour milk. His clothes were tattered, his hair was tangled, and the tip of his nose was missing. But without Kenny, Ms. Graves thought, Algernon might never sleep again.

  “And what of—the other one?” asked Mr. Snockett. “That snarky girl?”

  “Agatha, sir,” Ms. Graves said gently. “And she went out like a light.”

  Mr. Snockett heaved a wheezing sigh. “The way a child should be,” he said. “Quiet, respectful, and obedient. Smelly dolls aside, I’ll grant you’ve done well by them this past year.”

  Ms. Graves pressed her lips together tightly. She’d been governess to the Kojima twins for nearly two years—but one did not correct a man like Oscar Snockett.

  “And what about you, Ms. Graves?” the old man said, his wheelchair squeaking. “Are you excited to leave your native England and take up at Blackford House? I’m certainly paying you quite handsomely.”

  Mr. Snockett was leaning forward now, closer to the light. His sagging, shriveled face looked like a skull in the shadows—his cheeks hollow, his eyes empty and black and yet piercing just the same. Ms. Graves swallowed hard. Even here, in the darkened study, she felt as if Oscar Snockett could see into her very soul. Mr. Snockett was paying her quite handsomely—not to mention, it had always been a secret dream of Bedelia Graves to move to the States. But in the end, that’s not why she’d agreed to move.

  “I’m content to look after the twins wherever you see fit, sir,” said Ms. Graves. “We’ve grown quite fond of each other and . . . well, they need me, sir.”

  “Well, that’s the plan, isn’t it?” growled Mr. Snockett, and Ms. Graves’s heart began to pound. One did not want to irritate a man like Oscar Snockett.

  “I meant no disrespect, sir,” said the governess. “I only wished to express my gratitude for being allowed to go on serving you and your family.”

  Mr. Snockett sneered. “My family,” he said sarcastically. “A great-niece and great-nephew I’d never met until their parents up and died on them. Family indeed. If I wanted children about the place, I’d have had them decades ago.”

  Bedelia Graves remembered very little from decades ago. Granted, she was only thirty-two, but she felt much older. Perhaps it was because she’d spent so much time trying to forget her childhood that the memory of it seemed farther back than it really was. And what was there to remember anyway? Loneliness? A dingy flat in Leeds and the desperation to escape a father who treated her more like a servant than a daughter? Her mother had left them when Bedelia was ten, and the memories afterward were . . . well, not worth remembering.

  All that changed, however, when Bedelia Graves came to work for The Agency at the age of nineteen. There had been other children, of course, but none like Agatha and Algernon Kojima. And in the two years since Oscar Snockett hired her to look after them in his dark and dreary mansion, Bedelia Graves had broken The Agency’s cardinal rule: she’d grown to love them.

  The governess cleared her throat and stood up straight. “You’ve been more than generous, sir. The children are forever in your debt. As am I.”

  “Are you now?”

  A heavy silence hung about the room, and then Mr. Snockett’s wheelchair squeaked and his face sank back into the shadows.

  “In any event,” he said, “Blackford House belongs to the twins. I never liked their father. I’ve made no secret of that. Prancing about with his silly puppets. But I’ve always had a soft spot for my niece, despite her going against my wishes and marrying that fool. Nasty business, sometimes. Family. But in the end, we Snocketts do take care of our own—no matter how inconvenient.”

  The old man had popped the final t of inconvenient so sharply that it sounded like a twig snapping. Ms. Graves flinched.

  “I’ve personally seen to all the necessary arrangements,” Mr. Snockett continued. “Immigration details, accounts, disbursement of your salary and whatnot. You and the twins shall be well provided for, but I do not wish to be troubled any further. Do you understand, Ms. Graves?”

  “Very much so, sir.”

  Mr. Snockett dangled a large red jeweled pendant into the shaft of light and swung it back and forth like a hypnotist’s charm. And for a moment, Ms. Graves was hypnotized. She just stood there, blinking, with her mouth ajar.

  The pendant’s single red jewel was glowing.

  “For good luck on your journey,” said Mr. Snockett.

  “I—er—” the governess stammered, “I cannot accept such a gift, sir.”

  “Take it!” the old man snapped, and Ms. Graves obeyed. The red jewel was about the size of a fifty-pence coin, but it was no longer glowing. Quite the opposite; the jewel now looked black in Ms. Graves’s hand. And it was ice cold.

  The governess shivered.

  “Wear it. Always,” Mr. Snockett said with a magician’s wave of his hand, and Ms. Graves felt dizzy. She shook her head, blinked, and in the next moment the dizziness lifted, and she clasped the pendant’s chain around her neck. She didn’t have a choice.

  After all, one did not refuse a man like Oscar Snockett.

  One

  The Rightful Heirs

  “Take it back!” Lucy shouted, and Billy Mahoney squealed in pain.

  Lucy was on top of him now, pinning the boy on his stomach and twisting his arm behind his back. Billy tried to wriggle free, but Lucy wedged her thigh under his pudgy elbow and, sh
ifting her weight, cranked his arm higher. Billy howled.

  “Lucy, stop it!” cried her brother, Oliver, but Lucy just ignored him.

  “You take back what you said, Billy Mahoney, or I’ll break your arm!”

  “Okay, okay, I take it back!”

  “Take what back?”

  “Frog-face! You’re not a frog-face!”

  Lucy let go of Billy and stood up—her fists ready just in case the bigmouth wanted to go a second round. But Billy, half-dazed and moaning, just rolled over and sat there rubbing his arm. The front of his Captain America T-shirt was filthy, and his chubby, freckled cheeks were beet red. Oliver tried to help him up, but Billy shook him off and rose unsteadily to his feet.

  “You okay?” Oliver asked. Billy dragged his wrist under his nose. He was breathing hard, and Lucy could tell he was trying not to cry. For a long, tense moment there was only the buzz of insects and the soft babble of the river there in the woods, and then Billy narrowed his eyes at Lucy and said:

  “Shoulda called you psycho instead.”

  Lucy set her teeth and lunged for him, but Oliver blocked her path and held her by the shoulders. His eyes were wide and pleading behind his glasses—Don’t do this! Not here! those eyes said.

  Lucy held his gaze for a moment, then sighed and uncurled her fists.

  Oliver let go of her and pushed up his glasses.

  “Let’s just forget about it, okay?” he said, turning back to Billy—but Billy was already shuffling toward his bike. “Where you going?”

  “I need to get back to the store,” Billy said quietly. He grabbed his bike by the handlebars and began pushing it up the bank. Oliver swiveled his eyes between Lucy and Billy, and after an awkward silence, said:

  “So, I guess I’ll see you tomorrow, then?”

  Billy shrugged, and a second later he was gone behind a clump of trees.

  Lucy watched after him for a moment as Oliver picked up something off the ground. A crumpled bag of Skittles. Billy must’ve dropped it when she tackled him, Lucy figured, and a pang of guilt seized her heart. Billy was twelve, a year older than Lucy, but short for his age, like her. And he clearly knew nothing about fighting—which hardly made things fair. Lucy was an expert on fighting—not to mention she had really liked Billy up until he made that crack about her being a frog-face.

  What happened? One minute the three of them were laughing and searching for turtles, and then the next . . .

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” Oliver said, brushing some dirt off the Skittles. “Billy was just talking trash like you were.”

  Lucy opened her mouth and snapped it shut again. She had been talking trash. Something about seeing Billy’s plumber’s crack when he bent over—which was true, and not nearly as bad as calling someone a frog-face. But still, Lucy could hardly consider herself an innocent bystander.

  “Anyway, don’t do that again,” Oliver said. “Billy’s my friend.”

  Lucy frowned. At least Oliver had a friend here in Watch Hollow—which was one more than Lucy had. Billy’s father owned the hardware store in town, and over the past two months, Oliver and Pop had gotten chummy with them. Billy’s father even made Pop a member of the Rotary Club. Lucy wasn’t quite sure what a Rotary Club was—only that her father thought it was a big deal and they didn’t let kids in.

  Lucy’s eyes drifted back to the river. Oliver was right. Billy was just talking trash—and certainly no worse trash than idiots like Betty Bigsby used to talk back home in Massachusetts. But Lucy’s home now was here in Watch Hollow, Rhode Island. And for some reason, Billy talking trash was just one more thing about this place that made her feel . . . well . . . mixed-up was the only word Lucy could think of at the time.

  Lucy’s stomach knotted. A thought had caught her by surprise, and yet Lucy understood on some level that it had been swimming around in her head for a while—just beneath the surface, like the turtles she sometimes caught in the shallow river. School would be starting next week. What if the kids here in Watch Hollow didn’t like her? What if they called her a frog-face, too?

  All this flashed through Lucy’s mind in an instant, but when she met her brother’s eyes again, he looked away and dragged his wrist across his brow.

  Oliver didn’t seem mixed-up these days. Just the opposite. Two months ago, his forehead and chin had been covered in pimples, but now his skin was clear and tan. The countless hours they’d spent outside had done wonders for his complexion. And not just that, Oliver’s arms looked almost muscular now. He didn’t spend nearly as much time cooped up inside with his comic books as before. In fact, Lucy couldn’t remember a time when she’d seen her brother so happy—that is, until she screwed things up.

  Lucy nervously fingered the single braid of her long black hair. Her heart felt twenty pounds too heavy for her chest. “I’m sorry,” she said, and Oliver shoved the bag of Skittles into his pocket.

  “Let’s just forget about it.”

  But once they were back across the river, Lucy could tell that Oliver hadn’t forgotten about it. He didn’t say a word, didn’t even look at her as they wound their way up the long dirt driveway toward Blackford House. There were no woods on this side of the river, only clusters of flowering trees and vast, gently sloping lawns—which was why, Lucy thought, out here in the sunlight, Oliver’s anger seemed all the more real.

  A lump rose in Lucy’s throat and she bit her lip. If only she understood why things felt so mixed-up lately. Then again, there were a lot of things about Watch Hollow that Lucy didn’t understand. And not understanding things in Watch Hollow always led to trouble. Look what happened to Mortimer Quigley. He thought he understood the way things worked around here, and accidentally brought back from the dead an evil alchemist named Edgar Blackford. As a result, the enormous clock in Blackford House stopped ticking. Mr. Quigley hired Lucy’s father to fix it, but it was really Edgar Blackford, that vicious tree monster, who’d been pulling the strings. The Garr, the clock animals had called him.

  The clock animals.

  The lump rose higher in Lucy’s throat. When she first arrived at Watch Hollow, the clock animals had been able to come alive. But now that the Garr was dead and the clock was fixed, they had to remain in its face as wooden statues. There were thirteen of them in all—one for each number and a cuckoo bird named Tempus Crow—but Lucy missed Torsten the dog, Fennish the one-eyed rat, and Meridian the cat most of all. They were the best friends she’d ever had; and yet, without them to power the clock, the magic in Blackford House wouldn’t work.

  Maybe that was it, Lucy said to herself as she looked around. Even though Watch Hollow was back to normal, things felt . . . well, too normal. Watch Hollow felt like any other stupid town. If only Torsten were alive again, Lucy thought. The little dog always knew how to make her smile.

  At that moment, Lucy heard a car coming up the driveway—a silver BMW, she discovered once it was almost upon her. The children moved out of the way, and the car barreled past, kicking up so much dust that Lucy couldn’t see who was inside.

  Lucy and Oliver hurried after it, and by the time they reached the house, they found the car parked beside their father’s ancient pickup. Between the two vehicles stood a smartly dressed woman and two children with longish bobs of jet-black hair—a girl and a boy, Lucy realized as she drew closer. The girl wore a uniform like the private school snots wore back home, while the boy was dressed in shorts, a cardigan vest, and a bow tie. His long bangs were like a curtain over his eyes, and his argyle socks stretched up to his knees. They were the strangest-looking kids Lucy had ever seen. And even stranger, the boy was carrying a creepy samurai doll that was half as big as he was.

  “Who are you?” the woman asked, her eyes flitting between Lucy and the truck. The woman’s hair, done up tightly in a bun, was a deep red, but not quite as red as the large ruby pendant that hung about her neck. The jewel sparkled in the sunlight. Lucy felt hypnotized by it, and just blinked back at the woman blankly.

&nbsp
; “There’s no need to be afraid, young lady,” the woman said gently. “We’re just as surprised to see you as you are to see us.”

  The woman sounded British. Just like Mr. Quigley, Lucy thought, and the back of her neck prickled with dread. Lucy gulped and looked to Oliver for help.

  “Er—my name’s Oliver Tinker,” he said. “And this is my sister, Lucy. We live here. With our father, I mean.”

  “Here?” the woman asked. “In Blackford House?”

  “Uh-huh,” Lucy said. “We’re—you know—the caretakers.”

  “The caretakers?” the woman said, confused. Lucy nodded, and the woman eyed her skeptically down her long thin nose. “All right, then,” she said, stiffening her spine. “Let’s get to the bottom of this. Where is your father now?”

  “Right here,” he called from the porch. His sweatshirt was covered with grease and his curly red hair was all sweaty. Even though the clock was ticking perfectly now, for the past two months, Lucy’s father had been working day and night on a fail-safe in case things ever went haywire again. No one wanted a repeat of what happened last time.

  Mr. Tinker beamed as he bounded down from the porch; but as he drew closer, Lucy noticed her father’s smile falter and his cheeks turn red. He chuckled nervously and, wiping the sweat from his brow, left a smear of grease there.

  Lucy swiveled her eyes back to the woman, whose mouth was now turned up ever so slightly in a smile.

  “I—er—Charles Tinker,” he said, extending his hand. The woman eyed it coolly—the hand was too filthy to shake—and Lucy’s father immediately pulled back and wiped it on his jeans.

  “My name is Bedelia Graves,” the woman said. “The Kojimas and I have come all the way from England to live at Blackford House. The children are its legal heirs.”

  Lucy’s heart seized, and she traded an anxious glance with Oliver. The way she understood things, there were no heirs to Blackford House—which was why the deed had been handed over to Pop. Lucy had seen it herself, right there in black and white. Charles Tinker was now the owner of Blackford House—not to mention, they’d already moved all their stuff from the city. And what they hadn’t moved, they’d sold. The clock shop was totally empty now and had a For Rent sign in the window!