Free The Alchemaster's Apprentice by Walter Moers Page B

suddenly. ‘Shall I cook us a ghost or not?’
    Echo recoiled. Ghoolion’s tone was as sharp as a sword thrust.
    ‘Please do,’ he said in a subdued voice.
    The Alchemaster laid the bellows aside and drew his cloak around him. ‘Alchemists have always engaged in a variety of ludicrous attempts to transform one substance into another,’ he said. ‘Lead into gold, blood into wine, wine into blood, wood into bread, bread into diamonds. It used to be considered quite professional for an alchemist to sprinkle a stone with magnetised quicksilver when the moon was full and hope that it would turn into marzipan.’
    ‘But lead into gold - that works, doesn’t it?’ Echo asked diffidently. He had heard of such a feat at some stage.
    Ghoolion sighed. ‘I can see that, alchemistically speaking, your state of knowledge is that of a medieval village idiot. I shall have to begin at rock bottom.’
    The little Crat gave another start, but not at a thunderclap this time. The Alchemaster could be really hurtful at times. He moved away, looking offended.
    ‘Gold and lead!’ Ghoolion said scornfully. ‘Those early alchemists tried to transform two of the densest substances on our planet.’
    Echo had crept behind an untidy stack of battered old books.
    ‘Well?’ he called from his hiding place. ‘Why not?’
    ‘The denser the substance, the less susceptible it is of transformation,’ Ghoolion replied. ‘You might as well try to teach a brick to fly. Volatile substances are our only chance - any well-informed alchemist will tell you that.’
    Ghoolion uncorked a glass bottle containing a reddish liquid, thereby releasing a tiny cloud of pink vapour. Echo could have sworn the vapour giggled as it dispersed. His curiosity rearoused, he emerged from his hiding place.
    Ghoolion was now standing in front of an oil painting, a most impressive representation of a volcanic eruption.
    ‘The years of study I’ve devoted to painting disasters have taught me an important lesson,’ he said, engrossed in the picture. ‘No one who has observed how systematically a fire incinerates a town, how methodically a volcano buries a village in lava, how deliberately a tornado ravages an island, or how murderously a tsunami inundates a whole stretch of coastline and all its inhabitants, can believe that those natural forces act blindly. They think - they’re rational beings like you and me!’
    As if to confirm this audacious theory, there was a blinding flash outside, followed almost immediately by a peal of thunder.
    Echo flinched. ‘But a thunderbolt like that one can’t have anything very nice in mind.’
    ‘Of course not,’ Ghoolion said brusquely. ‘Elemental forces think elemental, violent thoughts. Destruction is their purpose in life, their function, their destiny. They cleanse the earth of inessentials without compunction, without wasting an ounce of their strength on mercy or compassion. They think big.’ The Alchemaster continued to gaze at the painting. ‘But the crucial question is,’ he went on, ‘how do their thoughts manifest themselves?’
    Echo strove to picture the thoughts of a forest fire, but his powers of imagination were insufficient. All he could visualise were billowing flames and charred trees.
    ‘Where there’s fire there’s smoke,’ said Ghoolion. ‘Once you’ve managed to conceive of smoke as the cogitations of fire, the stench of sulphur as a volcano’s nightmare and steam as the ideas of a geyser, you soon come to realise that the whole earth is a living, thinking being.’
    Echo didn’t like the turn the conversation was taking, nor did he care for Ghoolion’s increasingly ominous tone of voice. Another flash of lightning lit up the laboratory and an ear-splitting peal of thunder set all its glass vessels rattling.
    ‘If the earth is a living, thinking being,’ said Ghoolion, raising his voice to make himself heard above the tempest raging outside, ‘I should be able to find a way to read its