The Alchemist in my Neighborhood

One day, I was tromping around in the woods near home; the suburb we lived in wasn’t so overdeveloped that all the forested areas around the fringes were cut down yet, when this strange man pops out of the underbrush. He always wore this kind of cut up lab coat like a cloak draped around his shoulders. I guess he must have had a couple of them because the stains and grease marks kept changing places every time you saw him.

So this guy comes bursting out of the bushes and we scare each other half to death. He wasn’t some old man, probably just a few years out of college, if you even go to college to become an alchemist. I saw him around the neighborhood now and then and he always looked like he’d just rolled out of bed or was stoned out of his mind.

But anyway, we just about run into each other and we’re both spooked. A real “what are you doing here? No, what are YOU doing here?” moment for us, but no one said it. Instead he composed himself and started asking me if I’d seen a girl around, describing her to me. I realized he must be talking about this other kid who lived nearby; I hadn’t seen her though. The whole time we’re chatting, this guy was cradling a little frog or toad or whatever in his hands.

So I finally work up the courage to ask him what the hell he’s doing out in the woods looking for little girls. Apparently she’d run away from home, childish tantrum shit, and her parents hired him to find her. I’d heard that the alchemist sometimes took on odd jobs from people, but this really seemed like something for the cops. I must have said that too, because the guy gave me a shrug and mentioned that her parents wanted the matter sorted before things had to get complicated with police and search parties.

Not hard to imagine why she had issues with them, right?

None of that really explained why he was out there holding onto a frog though. So I ask and he told me that he’d been using dowsing rods to follow her trail, but she went near a small pond out in the forest and the charge from the water made it impossible to pick up her track again. It all sounded like bullshit to me. I mean, I knew where that pond was but the dowsing stuff is nonsense, right? Walk around with metal rods picking up magic vibes or whatever, like you’re a computer connecting to cosmic wifi and google searching for things.

By this point we were walking and talking, I’m just sort of following him back toward the street listening to his silly talk. He gets around to explaining that with the trail too obscured for dowsing, he had to pick up a witness for questioning. At that point he held up that poor frog, careful not to let it escape.

“Hey kid,” he says to me. “Do you want to see something special?”

Now I was no naive little boy and in pretty much any other situation where I hear a line like that, I’m kicking the guy in the balls and running. But I considered that guy to be harmless enough and I was starting to get real curious about how he was going to interrogate a frog, so I say sure and off we go to his garage. I guess the place was his workshop because it was packed with everything but a car. Never have I seen a bigger collection of what looked like random junk. Not piled up, mind you, but assembled into crazy science fiction contraptions and lined up on floor to ceiling shelves.

The alchemist approached one of those machines, it looked like a pressure cooker submarine windmill with a little porthole and three metal wheels attached to the sides. Plop, the frog goes in the central chamber and screw, screw, screw the lid gets tightened on. This guy brings over an honest to god raygun on a tripod and points it at the other thing with the frog in it, starts cranking it up until there’s this whiny sound. Suddenly there’s this whuzwhuzwhuzing sound and the porthole lights up with a weird glow.

I stood staring at the light wondering what the hell this has to do with asking a frog some questions, then I realized that the alchemist was looking away at the wall behind me. I turned around and there, like we’re in a movie theater, is a projection of the area around that pond. The guy’s mumbling to himself and speculating about the image like some sort of film critic. Then he starts spinning the wheels on the machine and the picture starts changing. It’s going back and forward like he’s mashing the rewind and fast-forward buttons on a remote.

He saw me staring like a dumbass with my jaw on the ground and just says, “I’m adjusting the magnetic fields to offset for the Earth’s rotation and get a view of last night,” as if that clears up everything. But I look back at the wall and sure enough the image is that of the pond at night. He kept fiddling with the controls for a few minutes before, for just a second, this girl goes dashing across the scene.

That guy spun the wheels this way and that, replaying that moment over and over to try to figure out which direction she’s headed off in. Before he figured it out though, I realized I know exactly where she’s going.

“Hey mister,” I said. “You didn’t hear this from me, but there’s a fort made out of deadfall and scrap wood out to the west from that pond. Kids use it as a secret hideout, that type of play, you know? I think she went out that way.”

He turned off the machines and thanked me. At that point I noticed the little porthole was still glowing a bit, but I couldn’t see the frog anymore. Before the window goes dark, I’m sure I see the glass streaked with something gooey and froggy. Grossed the hell out of me, so much so that when the alchemist gave me a candy out of appreciation for my help, well I took it but I couldn’t eat it. Some homemade thing he called a philosopher’s jawbreaker, smugly like it was a great joke. All I could think about was the taste of frog guts though.

I heard later that he found that girl, got her back to her parents before the whole thing became a mess. The kids in the neighborhood were pissed that an adult found the fort. I never really talked with the alchemist again after that, but you know, I think I still have that candy around somewhere.