"Lisa Tuttle - Pathology" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tuttle Lisa)

phoned the police immediately on his mobile, the burglars managed to get away with the TV and VCR.
These were easily replaced. Daniel kept little that he valued on the ground floor of his narrow,
two-bedroomed turn-of-the-century terraced cottage. Practically everything that mattered to him was
kept locked in his “workroom,” otherwise the spare bedroom.

Daniel was a chartered accountant in his ordinary life, but in his workroom he was an alchemist.

He told me this, as he’d told me about Michele, early in our relationship. It meant nothing to me then. If
asked to define alchemy, I’d have said it was a sort of primitive, magical chemistry, bearing about the
same relationship to modern chemistry as astrology did to astronomy. It seemed a very strange hobby for
someone as sane and successful as Daniel, but I kept my mouth shut as he unlocked his workshop to
show me the shelves filled with ancient, leather-bound volumes, sealed jars with Latin labels, beakers and
retorts, a Bunsen burner, vessels of copper and of glass. The smells were what most struck me: half a
dozen different odors lingering in the air. Sulphur, roses, hot metal, burnt sugar, tar, and something
pricklingly acidic which made me cough.

“What do you do here, exactly?”

“Do you really want to know, ‘exactly’?”

“Generally, then.”

“Search. Explore. Study. Experiment. I’m looking for the Philosopher’s Stone—does that mean anything
to you?”

I shook my head apologetically. “Afraid not.”

He kissed me. “Never mind. If you are interested, I can help you learn, but it doesn’t matter; we can’t
share everything.”

As I watched him lock the door to his workshop, I wondered if it would matter. Of course couples
couldn’t share all their interests, but this hobby seemed less like stamp collecting, more like a religion.

We didn’t talk about alchemy and we didn’t talk about Michele, and as the weeks and the months
passed, and my love for Daniel became more deeply rooted, those two “untouchable” areas of his life
became irritants, and I wondered if there was a connection. I finally asked him if Michele had shared his
interest in alchemy.

He tensed. “She pretended that she did, for a while, but she didn’t. It was my fault as much as hers. I let
her know how important it was to me . . . but it’s not as important as honesty. If she’d just had faith in
me, instead of pretending she understood. . . . She lied to me.”

I held his hand. “I won’t lie to you. I won’t pretend. But I would like to know more about something so
important to you. You said you could teach me. . . .”

But the shutters were down; I was trespassing. He shook his head firmly. “No. I won’t make that
mistake again. It’s better if you don’t know, and you won’t be put in an insidious position. If you don’t
know anything about The Work, we can’t possibly argue about it.”

I wished I’d never mentioned Michele. I began to hate the invisible woman who still hovered on the