The Alchemist's Dog

It was on a midnight in November when I visited the alchemist again. We had been friends during college, but after graduation we had steadily drifted apart as we pursued our disparate paths in life; me into the mundane world of finance and trade, and him deeper into the eccentric studies for which he was constantly ridiculed by the scientific establishment of the time. The rain was pouring out of a black sky as I stood on the small sheltered porch of his townhouse, waiting for an answer to my knock. Eventually his shadowed face appeared behind a crack in the doorway, and small white hand, thin and spotless as a doll’s, beckoned me inside. He looked older than I remembered him. His abundant black hair was beginning to gray. But his eyes glowed with a nervous excitement brighter than I had ever seen in him before.

“I see you got my letter. Thank you for coming, I was afraid you wouldn’t.” He said simply.

“Of course I’d accept an invitation from an old friend.” I replied. “But tell me, what is this about?”

“I’ll explain everything in here.”

He ushered me into the sitting room, where an armchair and a commodious leather couch faced each other across a table forested with dozens of slender yellow candles in elaborate holders caked with hardened wax. Three high, knife-pointed windows looked down from above, glowing a dull red in the reflected firelight. Spreading its weight over half of the couch was a French Mastiff of imposing size, whose deep, dark folds of wrinkled flesh seemed to melt seamlessly into the leather cushions beneath it. I squeezed myself into a seat behind the dog’s rump, brushing its tail as I did so, but it made no sound nor moved from its languid position. The alchemist sat down on the armchair.

“Where is your father?” I asked.

“He died a year after we finished college. Tuberculosis.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Yes. Fortunately, he left thorough records of his work behind, allowing me to build on the basic advancements he made in the study of transmutation.”

“Is that why you called me here?”

“Yes. I have achieved something truly remarkable, and since you always defended my field of interest when we were in college without concern for your own reputation, I thought it was only right that you should be the first person to know…”

My friend settled himself deeper into the crimson armchair and steepled his fingers below his thick, rosy lips. I said nothing, waiting for him to continue. For some reason, probably the poor lighting in the room, I was unnaturally apprehensive about what would follow.

“Well, I’ll begin by telling you that three weeks after I returned home from the University, my father perfected the transmutation of lead into gold.”

“He did?!” I exclaimed. Unsure whether to believe him. Soon enough my doubt would be dispelled.

“Indeed. I witnessed it myself. It is an arduous process. The amount of gold produced in the end is hardly worth more than the cost of the materials necessary to make it, so you need not worry about any threat to your profession. However, the real value of the experiment lay in the proof of concept. It demonstrated what respectable scientists have thought impossible since the eighteenth century, namely that a pure, elemental substance can be transformed into another such substance without undergoing any intermediate chemical changes.”

“You see, when modern chemists talk of atoms, electrons and bond energies, they are not seeing the forest for the trees. Molecular structure is nothing more than that particular aspect of the underlying qualities of matter which can be detected using conventional chemical equipment. To understand and change the true essence of matter requires an altogether different approach. An approach that is best described as occult.”

When he said this the great dog suddenly stirred beside me and turned its head in his direction. In the dim light I could make out little of the creature’s appearance other than its extremely blunted profile; extreme even compared to most dogs of that breed. I heard it let out a wet, almost inaudible rasping sound from somewhere inside its silhouette of a head, like the wheezing of a sickened geriatric, but the alchemist seemed not to notice.

“Once a person has mastered this approach,” he went on, “making gold becomes a trifle. In fact, it is an affront to the field of transmutation as a whole, which can and should be used for infinitely greater things. For instance, I think you would agree that the true prize of this science, the one with the deepest implications for the human condition, would be the transmutation of living matter.”

At this point he paused to replace a candle in one of the thickest holders that was burning dangerously low. I remained silent, thinking about what he had said as I studied the portrait of his father hanging on the mantelpiece behind him. The man had possessed none of the delicate handsomeness of his son, with downward-drooping eyes and thick, flabby jowls.

“Unfortunately,” my friend began again, “My father never came around to my way of thinking. Right up until the end, he insisted that mineral transmutation was the sole useful application of alchemy, and everything else was a crazed fantasy.” He glanced sadly at the portrait behind him. “Of course, living matter is far more complex than inorganic matter, being an amalgam of many different substances. But I was not deterred, and now we come to the point of this conversation. As you must already suspect, I have finally succeeded in the transmutation of life, not just of any particular tissue, but of a whole organism into another.”

All of a sudden, there was a storm of nails and fur as the dog swiveled around loudly on the couch towards me. I felt a sudden tight grip on my arm, and looked down to see a five-fingered, grotesquely human hand.