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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