Free Kolchak The Night Strangler by Richard Matheson, Jeff Rice Page B

with still more acids.
    Then follows a process of drawing off all toxic gases, certain liquids as well, and a recalcining process for the remaining solids. All this takes years and years, according to what I read. And, I imagine, great patience. Oxidizers are added, and then more dissolutions, calcinations, ad infinitum.
    As I said, I don’t even pretend to understand most of what I read. However, after these many laborious steps, whatever liquid mixture remains is put into a rock crystal container, which is hermetically sealed, and heated very, very slowly.
    The whole idea is to produce, by heating and cooling continuously, and then distilling, time and time again, a water, often ruby in color, which has incredible chemical and medicinal qualities. This substance, whatever it is, (and I have never tasted it but have, as you will see, discovered what happens when it is not taken) is the Elixir of Life.
    The one thing I did get a clear picture of from the texts Dr. Helms left with me (especially from her own writings) was that the so-called puffers were men of little patience, often greedy and occasionally evidencing Messianic tendencies which almost invariably seemed to go hand in hand with delusions of grandeur and the right to take human life indiscriminately.
    As for St. Germain, whom Dr. Helms had mentioned so pointedly, his history was rather disturbingly similar in many ways to that of my late acquaintance, Janos Skorzeny. Although eyewitness accounts differ as to his eating habits (some opting for the oatmeal and groats theory, while others contend he ate nothing at all, yet another power attributed to true adepts), he seems to have had the quaint habit of turning up in several centuries, under different names, but almost always with the same description: medium height, dark, slim, with remarkable vitality, a copious amount of charm, the strange ability to transmute lead to gold, an affinity for night life, and the equally quaint habit of disappearing at will, only to turn up again in another time and another country.
    In 1645, Eiranaeus Philalethes is supposed to have written: “glory to be God, Alone.” He was identified as a member of the Rose-Croix, a secret society supposedly founded in the fourteenth century by one Christian Rosenkreutz.
    Soon after Philalethes is supposed to have written this megalomaniacal phrase, he disappeared and a fellow known as Giraldi showed up in Austria looking exactly like him. He practiced alchemy, to the consternation of the locals in Vienna, and after a few years disappeared. His disappearance is listed as having taken place around 1690-1692—a good 50 year spread from 1645. By about 1695 a certain “Lascaris” or “The Lascar” began traveling across Europe and he, too, answered Philalethes’ general description. In time, somewhere near the French coast, according to some sources, he, too, disappeared. The dates given range from 1731 to 1739.
    Enter Count St. Germain in England around 1745. Again, the same description, the same practices; odd eating habits; transmuting base metals into precious ones. However, he became interesting to the law and so enlightened and renowned a personage as Horace Walpole himself stated St. Germain had been in England nearly two years and no one really knew anything about him except that he had no past and that his name was a phony one.
    St. Germain left England and showed up in France in 1758 at the court of Louis XV, who came to depend upon his services for diplomatic missions. St. Germain was involved in countless political intrigues. He was a charmer and a great talker and there is mention of at least one eyewitness who, in her late fifties, remembered a love affair with him thirty years before but was greatly amazed—and disturbed—to discover that while she had aged, he had not!
    St. Germain had a full bag of tricks, including increasing the size of pearls and diamonds, as well as their worth, and he was known to be something of a