The Flame Alphabet - Ben Marcus [125]
I mention this change only because this phase ended when I found the first child and began my project with assets, with person-derived inhibitors. Through medicine I brought myself back to the language and those tones of Claire went, what’s the word for it? They were gone. I do not hear them anymore.
For that I blame the craven desire to speak, to write, to be heard.
52
A word about my serum: it is more bitter than water. It is not as cloudy as milk. In the winter it thickens with crystals. It foams into a butter when I squeeze into it, by dropper, a juice of the dark valley salt.
When I need some, I pull it out of little ones. I used it first at Forsythe. The crude kind, the roughly gained immunity, drawn on the priceless account of the child’s person. It is the ingestion of this Child’s Play, I am sure, that undid LeBov, if he finally did expire.
And it is the ingestion of this that will soon, no doubt, leave me frozen on the forest floor somewhere, blinking in perfect sunlight at a world I can no longer see.
53
I did not assign names to the children I saw in the woods. A remote perspective was best, sheared of sentimentality, which impedes a productive workflow. Name not that which you intend to cultivate, was the saying. Maybe it was just my saying. But cultivate is such a strong word. They were little ones sometimes sitting alone on a log. Medicine comes at us in so many disguises. It hides in the leaves of plants, grows under tree bark, mulch, sand. Sometimes it stows away in more valuable items, items more resistant to intrusion, and this is where our challenge is fullest. The smallworker addresses these shapes, living or not, and beckons forth that medicine that might benefit the person. But when that medicine resides within the bodies of those entities commonly known as children, the process of extraction grows more, what is the word?
I do not know what the word is.
54
My purpose here is not to detail exactly how I got the Child’s Play serum to work, what sorts of failures I suffered along the way. I labored alone with limited tools seized from the half-looted pharmacy in town, made every sort of error, and at first I did not even know what I was looking for.
Blood and skin, perhaps hair, were the likely targets, so I found my way to small samples of these resources, siphoned or scraped them into bottles with little harm. But that got me nowhere close, because what I never saw at Forsythe was how these resources were processed. I knew nothing of the refinements such materials were subjected to, and I had no old man but myself upon which to test my discoveries.
If a little one wept quietly I played music, brought in a soup. Silence was the natural state of my subjects, who rarely probed their surroundings or tested the air with their small words. Perhaps it is because I looked like nothing they could speak to. The years had made me look unfriendly. Or not the years. Blame for my demeanor lies elsewhere. Perhaps the children felt I would be displeased, but if I was displeased it was for reasons that far predated their arrival in my hut. In every way I was a gentle guardian. I provided food and shelter, sometimes sat on the floor with them and played with the little sack of acorns I’d brought in for distraction.
After each round of extractions I tested the results down at the murmur line, walking into the blizzard of Aesop’s fables until the crushing took me.
When skin and hair failed, I moved to blood, pricking the child’s heel for a drop. I employed coagulants