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ALCHEMY
MARGARET MAHY
CONTENTS
1. Three Pens, a Pie and a Notebook
3. The View Across the Schoolyard
7. Looking Into an Invented Darkness
13. The Flicker in Mr Hudson’s Eyes
21. A Dangerous End to an Ordinary Day
So here it was again… coming through the dark at him – the dream, the nightmare that had haunted him for years. OK, he’d been through it all before. He already knew what was in store. He already knew there was no way of waking out of this particular dream until it had run its course. It would end in terror – as it always did. And yet that terror seemed to be necessary. He felt himself dividing like a cell, becoming two, then three people – the dreamer, the child in the dream and someone outside it – watching the dreamer dream… watching the child move innocently towards the coffin… and feeling the familiar panic as he watched it happening yet again.
Look! There they go, moving through the fairground, side by side, Roland and his father – hand in hand, yet apparently joined in other ways as well. And, in spite of the reassuring way his father’s hand curls around his fingers, Roland – the watcher – knows that Roland – the dream child – is becoming more and more alarmed with every step. He is being warned… warned from inside. I’m frightened, he is thinking. I am going to change. Everything is going to change. There’s no escape. Here it comes!
Yet there is not one single frightening thing to be seen in the world around him. There is nothing he can reasonably shrink from. Hand in hand with his father, the child walks forward.
I’ve been here before, he finds himself thinking – finds himself knowing – as they idle along through the fair. People in the jostling crowd point things out, waving hot dogs, or ice creams, or balloons as they do so. Looking at the bright, bobbing shapes against the yellow-green of new spring leaves, Roland thinks, There they are again, and walks on beside his father – the very father who will disappear on the day that Roland’s youngest brother, Martin, is born. (How can I possibly know that? Roland is wondering. Look! That’s me walking along! I’m only about four years old. Martin won’t be born for years.)
Standing on the edge of a small circle of lawn, the man and his son listen as a girl sings a folksong, Then they watch a juggler juggle, and an acrobat flop-and-flip. And now, through the applauding crowd, comes a figure enveloped in a black cloak, with a black crown on