More of it!

And further onwards. In this installment, we discover the true reason for our hero's indisposition, and the brave Alex battles armies of darkness, sepsis and outdated thinking. I'm sorry, I have absolutely no sympathy for Boromir. None. If I ever met him I'd have no problem with whapping him repeatedly with a stick. Same goes for the movie versions of Faramir and Eowyn. Whap!

We go deeper into the dark heart of my rather unhealthy psyche with this chapter. You may not enjoy it. You also may find it extremely boring, if you have no background in the harsh and bitchy world of medical history.

So, with the disclaimer that I own nothing in this story save my own neuroses and Alex, I bring you Meetings 3: Galen Goes Down. (Formerly titled "Galen v. Paracelsus: The Cage Match.")

In the gently babbling darkness of the river city, dim lights burned here and there as insomniac elves wrote their memoirs, desperate fangirls queued outside the firmly locked door of Legolas's private chambers, and one art history graduate desperately tried to remember her organic chemistry.

"Sod," said Alex after a while, dropping her pen and walking over to the great windows of Elrond's laboratory. The elflord had given up and gone to bed, pleading the need to pluck his eyebrows before repose, and left her to tinker with her extracts. She lit a cigarette, staring out at the darkness. Something was badly wrong.

Under higher magnification (produced by another hastily-thrown-together microscope, the lenses ground out of clear rock crystal and clamped in elegant steel rims which seemed to have developed the branchlike decoration common to all objects in Rivendell) the things she'd originally thought to be S. pneumoniae weren't, in fact. They looked remarkably convincing under low power—little encapsulated cocci that clung together in long strings—but with higher magnification, they didn't look so much like bacteria as little tiny dark beads, almost as if Frodo had inhaled a large quantity of minuscule polished onyx spheres.

Which was unlikely. Alex blew a smoke ring through the expanding center of its predecessor, and sighed. She was resolutely not thinking about what she thought she'd seen on the surfaces of those spheres. It would have to wait until she could get a better look at the slide—possibly taking it to an actual pathology lab, although she wasn't at all sure that anything organic from this plane would be able to move with her through time or space. Everything she had here was something she'd either made here or summoned from another annex of SOFA-space. The protostethoscope came from one of her older stories; the red thorn and the wax-sealed bottles from a story she'd read long ago. It was difficult to make things fit in from other worlds. She was in fact rather impressed with Elrond's acceptance of her suggestions, and with the progress he had already made.

But she really wanted a closer look at the little black dots in her sample.

She'd worked with Elrond to extract some of the active principles in the herbal mixtures he was already using. The old methods of concentrating and reducing, by pressing the herbs and steeping them in oil, worked to an extent; she'd managed to use what little she knew of chemical extraction and basic distillation to produce much purer concentrates of tussilago, ephedra, hyssop, feverfew, willow-bark, cherry bark, valerian, and the rest of the mainstays Elrond kept in his dispensary. She was pleased to note that they'd twigged to the narcotic properties of poppy juice, and that the one small vial of it in the cupboard was kept under lock and key.

Alex put out her cigarette in a glass dish already half-full of crushed cigarette ends and went back to the bench. She'd set up a very basic steam-distillation still, connecting a glass boiling-flask to a metal double-boiler topped by an alembic head with a long condensation coil—the sort of thing you saw in seventeenth century woodcuts.The water in the steam-generation flask under her still had almost boiled dry; she checked her watch, then blew out the flame under the flask and sat back, regarding the slow drip of the condensing fluid flowing down its coil. The sweet, heady fragrance of honeysuckle rose from the still, almost covering the stronger smells of alcohol and redfoil juice, which served as an antiseptic.

She watched as the last few drops detached themselves from the tip of the coil, and held the collection flask up to the light. A thin layer of oil floated on top of the water: the essential oil of the honeysuckle flowers and fronds, which could now be separated into its integral parts and purified.

Why don't I just go and find a bloody alchemist to do this for me? she wondered, or leave it to Elrond and his elven lab assistants? They seem perfectly competent.

Because I'm a meddling busybody, that's why, she answered herself, and decanted the oil into a separate phial, sealing it with wax. Because I want to do everything my way.

She sighed and put the phial with its fellows on the shelf, and went back to the bench. Time to check on Frodo, and maybe find out what he'd been doing to get himself infected with things that were pretending to be bacteria—and quite effectively acting like them—but weren't. Or were an entirely new kind of bacteria.

***

A dark tower, and a blasted heath; a wasteland and a maimed king, a river tinged with blood and a citadel fallen to mossy ruin with the turning of the years; a coming-together of stories and of concepts, a nexus of imagination, a meeting-place of the mind.

Or, if you think of it in less elegiac terms, an annex of SOFA-space inhabited by individuals who call themselves, without a hint of irony, The Dark Side.

One of them, Lady Sepulchravia de Mortuis, a slender maiden with death-pale skin finer than porcelain, eyes like dove's eyes and raven tresses that swept the ground as she walked, rose from her ebony throne and approached the Dark Palantir that hung turning in the air in the center of the chamber. "My sisters," she hissed, in a sweet, dead voice like rustling leaves, "he is in danger of escaping our influence."

Her compatriot Aurilienduilienar Eosiriel, called the Morningstar (hair the colour of slow-flowing venous blood and slightly shorter than Sepulchravia's, eyes the deep green of triple-distilled absinthe) leaned back in her chair, steepling fingers tipped with inch-long obsidian nails. "He will not escape. It is his destiny to come to us. He is written that way."

"He is written," said a third, Enitharmon Urizelaien (silver floor-length hair arranged in a crescent behind her head, dark midnight-blue eyes), "to be beautiful, and fragile, and full of sorrows. He is not destined for our clutches, sisters. We must fight for him."

"Enitharmon, you have insufficient faith," said Sepulchravia absently, regarding the palantir. "He will be ours. Already our influence grows in his body. His mind will soon follow."

"Then the elves have not found the source of his illness?" hissed Aurilienduilienar. "They know not of our involvement?"

"There is an interloper," said the Dark Lady. "One of our ilk, who is not yet as we are. Her powers are puny compared to ours. Men fail to fall at her feet; kingdoms have not hung in the balance over her. No one has even threatened suicide for lack of her favours."

"A moment's work," said Enitharmon, smiling a bright and cruel smile. "We shall destroy her utterly, and make her as dust."

"Of course," said Sepulchravia. "Yet be warned, my dark sisterhood, the intruder is armed with the knowledge of another world. Already she has slowed the influence of our power upon the Ringbearer. Remove her, and he will be ours, to do with as we desire."

"I desire to have him inhabit my quarters wearing nothing but a very fine mithril robe," said Aurilienduilienar. "And carrying a peacock-feather fan."

"We all know what you desire," snapped Sepulchravia. "You may take your turn when he is in our hands."

"You'll get him first, no doubt," said Enitharmon sulkily. "You get everyone first."

"Well, I am the loveliest of us," said Sepulchravia reasonably. "Lord Sauron himself knelt at my dainty feet and vowed he would destroy all Middle-Earth in my name."

"That's nothing," said Aurilienduilienar. "The Dark Lord Voldemort clasped me to his frigid bosom and muttered heartbroken oaths to me, calling me "his darkness" and "his abyss of refuge.""

"Yeah, well, I had that Devil guy all over me," said Enitharmon. "Offering me forbidden fruit, and that."

Aurilienduilienar and Sepulchravia shared a long-suffering older-sister look. "Enitharmon," said Sepulchravia after a moment, "shut up."

They had been called many things in their long lives; the Fates, the Kindly Ones, the Dark Sisters; but now, in this universe of change and of imagination, they had found their true niche as the Obsessors. From their dark tower on the blasted wasteland of what could have been Mordor, or 19th century industrial Yorkshire, or the Northlands beyond Damar, or the burning plains of Hell, they ruled through fiction, through the realms of dream and imagination. Their influence lay everywhere, from the inescapable popularity of bad vampire movies, to the ever-growing hordes of tubby teenage girls with eyebrow piercings and too much white pancake makeup who called themselves things like "Lady Death" and carried purses designed to look like coffins, to the little core of pure unpleasantness at the heart of every human being. Dark hearts were the majority, they had found, and it was so easy to tweak those darknesses just a little, just enough to produce irritation, annoyance, obnoxious behaviour, and pretentious self-importance. Ruling from their black pinnacle, the three Ladies of the Eternal Night (their hair wrapped about them in flowing ebony, argent and scarlet tresses) ruled their domain, and influenced the minds of men.

In this case, they were taking advantage of a mild oddity already present in their victims, and working from that platform. They knew, from their experience with the nineteenth century poets and playwrights, that the tortured, beautiful invalid male was one of the most powerful images in the minds of women. And knowing that, they moved into the fiction that could contain such images, and made it more so; leaned upon it with all the force of their combined strength. Examples of this include the film version of Chopin's life, Impromptu; the delightful extension of the old folktale Sleepy Hollow; and the more recent extravaganza based on the most classic Quest Pattern Story ever written, The Lord of the Rings. The hero of the latter was gently nudged by the power of the Dark Queens from being just a small being on a large quest to an ethereally beautiful young man struggling to stay alive under a burden far too heavy for him to bear. They watched with approval as young women everywhere felt a brilliant warm upwelling of adoration and anxiety over Frodo, and as they began to create stories about healing the Ringbearer of his admittedly myriad illnesses.

But now something different had taken the stage.Generally, the women who wrote sick Frodo stories knew a little of medieval medicine, enough to make their tales believable. The introduction of eighteenth and nineteenth, not to mention twentieth century medicinal innovations into the paradigm would cause the waveform to collapse. What efficacy did an ill wish have against crystal penicillin?

"She must be stopped, sisters," hissed Sepulchravia, her beauty luminous in the dim light of the palantir. "She must be stopped, or we are lost."

"It is noted," said Aurilienduilienar quietly. "She will be stopped."

tbc