Duck Boy (5 page)

“I don’t know what she was doing,” Steve insisted, raising his voice a
little. “All I know is that she stayed up late, reading and writing in her
notebook every night.”

“She was researching, Steve,” Aunt Shannon said, raising her voice to match
his. “She stayed up late to do her research. That’s what this notebook is all
about.” She held the book out at arm’s length and began to tenderly leaf
through the battered pages. “She needed her Benu stone to transform things, so
it must have been close to her, too.” She paused on a few of the battered
pages. “Hmm. I don’t recognize her work here. Unfortunately, I hadn’t talked to
her for several weeks before she disappeared, so I don’t know what she’d gotten
herself into.”

Uncle Edward sipped his tea as he read his book. He hadn’t even looked up
once throughout the conversation. He was probably ignoring both of them.

“Steve?”

“Yeah?” Steve answered sharply. Aunt Shannon looked up quickly and frowned.
“What?” he replied to her look. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. Mom
didn’t explain any of this stuff to me. I wasn’t asking, either.”

“I’m all sixes and sevens,” Aunt Shannon replied.

“What?” Steve asked, shaking his head.

“Sorry. That expression just means I’m confused. I thought you’d understand a
little.”

“Nope. None. Absolutely not.”

“Ach. Your mother, she really didn’t teach you what you need to…”

“Hey!” Steve cut her off.

The only one allowed to insult her is me.

“Sorry. Good point.” Aunt Shannon winced. “Poorly said.”

A few minutes of silence. “We have to talk about this, Steve,” she pleaded.
“It’s absolutely essential. I know you’re not happy, and you don’t seem to know
anything, but that’s OK. Now that we’re clear, our starting point is obvious.”

Steve pursed his lips, “Mmmmm.”

“Now, Steve,” Aunt Shannon began, “just because you didn’t know what your
mom was doing doesn’t let you off the hook. You have a responsibility to follow
the footsteps of the generations before you.”

“Huh?” He was genuinely confused.

Aunt Shannon shook her head sadly, but continued, “Since you’re here for the
holidays, you should begin to train in the family tradition.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you come from a long line of distinguished alchemists. It’s in the
family, you know. You’re the only one left.”

“I am not the only one left. What about Brian?” Brian was Steve’s cousin.

“I am sad to say that Brian does not believe in alchemy any more.” Aunt
Shannon spoke of him as if he were dead. “Uncle Ken and Aunt Mary gave up their
faith in this science, and so Brian, being a chip off the old block, gave it
up, too. And Richard.” Aunt Shannon paused. “Well, Richard is not of this world
anymore. He can’t help me.” She sighed.

“What if I don’t want to do it?”

“Why wouldn’t you want to do it?”

“You don’t want me, Aunt Shannon. I am not good at this kind of stuff. I
can’t do it.” Fluttering in the back of his mind were those horrible words he’d
come to hate:

Duck Boy. Duck Boy.

“How do you know? Have you ever tried?”

“No, I haven’t. But I’m failing Chemistry and Algebra, and practically every
other subject in the entire world. I’m no good.”

“You are good. You’re just the person we need.”

“How do you know? I only see you twice a year, once at Spring Break and once
over the summer for a few days. You know nothing about me.”

“I know lots about you,” she insisted.

“Whatever,” Steve grumbled.

“Your mother told me lots and lots about you.”

“My mother. Ha! That’s a joke. Do you know where she is right now?” Aunt
Shannon answered the question with silence. Steve answered his own question,
“She’s probably in Mexico or someplace like that. She just left. She didn’t
want me, not to help with experiments—not for anything.” Hot tears rushed to
his eyes, but he wouldn’t let them fall.

“That’s not true, Steve.” Aunt Shannon’s voice was quiet. “I think she
stumbled onto something big, really big. She just needs help to find her way
back. You can help her.”

He pushed his chair away from the table and stood. “I can’t help you, Aunt
Shannon. You need to face the truth. Nothing will bring her back…Nothing.” He
couldn’t stop the tears any longer. But before anyone could see him, he fled
the room, into the hallway, just out of sight. Peeking around the doorjamb, he
could still see his aunt and uncle at the table.

Aunt Shannon sat quietly for a moment. Uncle Edward glanced at her. “You
shouldn’t be getting that boy mixed up in all your flim-flam. You’re going to
end up getting him or yourself hurt…again.” He emphasized the last word in his
sentence carefully.

Steve’s tears fell silently. He mopped them up with his shirt sleeves.

Aunt Shannon smiled in a way that seemed like she, too, might cry. “Edward,”
she said sharply, “Stop it. Just because you’ve never liked alchemy doesn’t
mean other people should feel that way.”

“Listen, you already lost Richard….” Uncle Edward continued.

“That’s not fair!” Her face twisted in agony. “Are you going to make me pay
for that the rest of my life?”

“He was our only son,” Uncle Edward said quietly.

“I couldn’t have stopped him, and you know it,” Aunt Shannon said firmly.

A minute or two passed in silence. Steve wiped his eyes with his hands.

“It is going to be more difficult than I thought,” she mused. “I do have a
couple of tricks up my sleeve, though. I think I should introduce him to
Lindsay Locket.”

Uncle Edward snorted.

“What’s so funny, Edward? She’s a clever one, and she’s catching on to my
hocus-pocus quite quickly, thank you very much. For your information, she
already knows how to make her Benu stone. She just needs to find it.” She
paused and stared into her teacup, as if looking for hints of the future.
“We’re going to find Steve’s mother if it kills us.”

“Be careful,” Uncle Edward replied. “It just might.”

Steve had heard enough. From the hallway he tiptoed to his room.

Chapter 3

“I want to go home,” she wept, standing on the edge of a lake. The face
before her showed no emotion.

“That isn’t a possibility. You belong to us now. You won’t be going home
again.”

She continued to weep, thinking of her husband, Doug, and her son Steve.
“They’ll never know what happened.”

“They don’t need to know.”

“What are you going to do to me?” she asked, as bravely as she could.

“I think you can guess.”

She began to cry again.

It was twilight. On this night, her last.

“OK,” she said at last. “I’m ready.”

Deep grief wracked her body as the dissection began. And after a while, she couldn’t feel anything anymore.

Chapter 4

Steve brushed his teeth in front of the bathroom mirror. He didn’t look very
happy or healthy. His nose poked out a bit too far from his skinny face and
hollow cheeks. His features shared space with several red dots of acne and
freckles. His forehead was a bit too high. His teeth looked too big for his
mouth. A crop of short, spiky hair, flaming red, glowed atop his head. His
green eyes were rimmed with red.

There’s nothing great about me.

The mirror seemed to agree. He daubed toothpaste onto a finger, and touched
the red spots with the paste. This made things a little better.

His conversation with Aunt Shannon had stirred up the mud of old feelings.

It’s going to be hard to fall asleep tonight.

At home, he would have watched a few SpongeBob episodes on Netflix.
SpongeBob helped him forget and smile. He returned to his bedroom and pulled
out his iPod, checking for open wireless connections. There were several
networks in the area, but all of them were secure.

No SpongeBob tonight.

He prepared for bed quickly and slid under the covers with the bedside lamp
on. On the nightstand, among the knickknacks, sat an old book. Steve picked it
up. He read the title—
The Way of Alchemy
. The author,
Graham Pankratz.

No doubt Aunt Shannon placed this strategically.

He could feel the clouds of negativity darken and grow, so chose to read to
distract him from his thoughts.

“Books, the original iPods,” he said aloud.

The book’s cover was tooled leather, well used. He batted the cover open.
Someone had scrawled a greeting on the inside cover: “To William Durant
Pankratz, January 19, 1805.”

Aunt Shannon’s maiden name is Pankratz. So was my mom’s.

Obviously this was some old relative, somehow tied to his family through his
mother. He riffled through the book’s pages, stopping at the occasional
picture. There were drawings of laboratory instruments and odd symbols. Pictures
of creepy people. He paused on a page with a woodcut of a dragon eating its own tail. The caption underneath the
drawing read “Immortality and the Elixir of Life—the Ouroboros.”

In the middle of the book there were some disgusting photographs of human
body parts. Evidently these were part of the alchemist’s experimentation. He
thumbed through the last few pages, reading a paragraph here and there. The
words seemed like an odd mix of the Bible, magic, and science. He turned to the
first chapter, “Of Alchemical Philosophy,” and began to skim.

One paragraph jumped from the page:

The Benu stone is the central
goal of the alchemist’s work. Once successfully made, the stone is used to
transform one thing into another. Traditionally, many have understood that,
with this stone, lead could be transformed into gold. However, more recent
alchemists have begun to experiment with the idea that the Benu stone may lead
to transformations of a more general nature, not merely a transformation from
lead into gold.

Somewhere in the middle of Chapter Two, his head began to nod with sleep,
but by then he had a feeling for Alchemy—test tubes, experiments, fire, and
water, and the hunger for change. Sleep called him as he clung to the page’s
words until his eyes blurred and the book fell to his chest and slipped to the
floor. With his mind brimming and aflame with strange thoughts, Steve fell
asleep.

In the morning he rolled out of bed, hoping to find some sugary cereal
squirreled away in one of the kitchen cupboards. When he got to the kitchen, he
found Aunt Shannon sitting in a chair with a cup of tea in her hand, reading
Steve’s mother’s journal. A stranger, a girl about Steve’s age, sat beside her.

“Good morning, Steve,” Aunt Shannon said. “I’d like you to meet a friend of
mine. This is Lindsay Locket.”

Lindsay shot Steve a cold, polite smile. She seemed smart. Maybe a tad
geeky. Long golden hair framed her face, with a piercing pair of azure eyes.
Braces, yes. Possibly. Hard to remember because her eyes were so distracting.
He realized that his housecoat hung loosely about his shoulders and his hair
was a greasy fireworks display, his face dotted with dried dots of toothpaste.
In a flash, he wrapped the lapels of the housecoat together, cinching the belt
tight around his waist with an impossible knot. His face glowed as red as a
pimple.

“Ah… um… m-m-morning,” he stuttered as he pulled open a couple of cupboard
doors quickly, hiding his head behind them. “Do you have any cereal?”

“You mean breakfast cereal? No, we have porridge for breakfast. I made some
for you this morning and left it on the stove there.” She pointed to a battered
pot blurping on the stove. “Lindsay is keen on learning the alchemist
tradition, too, Steve. She can’t stay very long this morning, but she just
lives across the street.”

“Oh.” Steve’s voice echoed off the back of the cupboard.

Duck Boy. Duck Boy.

“I really have to be going now, Aunt Shannon,” Lindsay said smoothly. “Maybe…
ah… I’ll see you tomorrow.”