Alchemist Read Free

through the heavily protected protein shell. Finally it reached the egg inside and began to fuse with it.
    The sperm’s task was nearly over. Its long, stringy tail dropped off and was discarded. The sperm’s nucleus entered the egg and within minutes the egg had begun to divide. The sperm and the nucleus each carried twenty-three chromosomes – a half set. Each chromosome carried between 50,000 to 100,000 genes, which carried between them three billion units of DNA. Like all eggs, this one contained an X chromosome. The sperm contained a Y.
    By the time Sarah Johnson had fallen asleep, she was pregnant with a baby boy. Neither she nor her husband, Alan, had any forebodings that night. They had no way ofknowing then, as they lay in each other’s arms, that the child they yearned for so much would kill her without ever having spoken a word.

2
    Georgetown
,
Washington
.
September
,
1994
    The bird hung motionless in the sky above the small boy, its wings outstretched, as if suspended by invisible threads. Slowly, like the blades of a helicopter, it began to rotate on its own axis: a giant, black predator scouring the landscape beneath it for quarry.
    Suddenly it side-slipped, as if the threads had been severed, stopped and steadied for one fleeting moment; then it began to zigzag downwards, half flying, half plummeting, like a shadow chasing itself, its wings flapping clumsily as if they were clawing the air.
    Seconds later it alighted on the ground only a few yards from where he stood, with a thud. Its head jerked sharply up, and seemed to stare straight at him in surprise.
    The boy stared back for a moment in sheer disbelief. ‘DAAAADDDDDDYYYYYYY!’ he screamed. ‘DAAAADDDDYYYY! DAAADDDYYYY! DAAADDDYYYY! DAAADDDYYYY! DAAAA –’
    â€˜Honey, it’s OK, honey. Mummy’s here, your mummy’s here!’
    Then the face of the bird dissolved into bright light.
    Silence.
    Conor Molloy opened his eyes, stared up at the glow of the pearl bulb in its familiar plain shade. Then he saw the bookshelves lined with his old comics, annuals, children’s encyclopaedias, his tiny microscope …
    The room was as he had left it a decade and a half ago; the same flimsy curtains, the dull red carpet, the white chest of drawers. The bed he now lay in was the same bed that he hadoutgrown some time in his teens, but which had never been changed.
    â€˜Conor, you all right?’
    His mother’s face was peering at him anxiously, her slender fingers glinting with the base metals of far too many rings, and in an instant nothing had changed. Fifteen years, more, were stripped away like bedclothes. He was a child again, a small boy saved from a nightmare by his mother.
    â€˜Honey, darling, are you all right?’
    He swallowed the lump that was in his throat and nodded.
    â€˜You were hollering your head off.’
    â€˜I’m sorry.’
    â€˜The dream? Was it the dream?’
    He was quiet for a moment, wondering whether to admit it, aware of the rebuke it would bring once more. But he knew there was no point in trying to hide anything from her, she could always see through him. She could read the inside of his head as clearly as if it were beaming out to her from a television screen. ‘Yes,’ he said.
    She was fifty-six and still beautiful. Her long dark hair was flecked with occasional grey strands, but they looked more like highlights than age. Her blue eyes were still set in a fine classical face, barely different from the one that he had seen staring out from the host of mail-order catalogues and magazine ads she kept crammed away in a cupboard.
    However much she might have embarrassed him as a child with her strange behaviour in front of his friends, he looked at her now and knew that he had never ceased loving her. He admired her for all that she had given him as a mother.
    â€˜You want to go back to sleep or you want a drink?’ she asked.
    Conor glanced at his