In the months from the manor, labor piled and awaited my return.  Of course, there were more questions.  Money could perhaps delay the inquest of Faustus’ disappearance, but could not foreclose on it.   Results of experiments needed transcription and analysis, while a number of chemical compounds required rendering.  Wagner was desperately trying to duplicate the experiments of Faustus.  He simply needed to know what happened to the man.

    I worked endless days with Wagner, and nightly on perfecting my isolation and extraction of the alkaloid from the vella root.  Advancement in this endeavor assured a sample would be prepared for the bold in situ experiment loosely planned. 

    Wagner expanded my circle of responsibilities out of necessity.  Though he hired on more help, he kept me to the secret details and the mundane recreations of the experiments.  I soon bored with his copycat pursuit and ever more the ready to try my perfecting formula.

    The man was rude and crude to me.  He no longer masked suspicion.  He scoured me for some insight into what had happened to Faustus in the laboratory that night.  I acted, as if equally in the dark on the matter.

    Wagner was tall and handsome, a stoic Roman with no business hiding himself within the laboratory dungeon of our benefactor.  Though he was a scientist, he was built of muscle and bone.  Many people in the village adored him though I never did.  It was in part due to these qualities that he became my first subject.  More so, however, it was his maltreatment of me that made certain his fate. 

    Brooding through the night and to the rise of morning I completed what would be a final version of the elixir.  Cruikshank’s formula, coupled with the Forbidden Knowledge provided by the White One, was before me in a large glass tube.  The liquid was a milky gray, somewhere in thickness between blood and water, and released an indescribable pungent odor.  My stomach turned about at the thought of ingesting a thing of such sight and smell.

    It was now time for the true terror to begin.  I asked myself how an inadequate boy such as I, too timid to engage in the most rudimentary social interaction would muster a charismatic force of persuasion great enough to have someone drink the putrefied broth.  I especially doubted I could entice one so cynical and skeptical as Wagner.

    There lied the trouble of the aftermath.  That is, if the drink served its purpose and I held the power to exchange the essence of my being with that of Wagner, then what would I do next?  In this equation I would still have Wagner’s essence.  He would be in my body, yet completely free to move about causing all sorts of havoc and attentions.  Reason dictated that I must eliminate the man before any unwanted attentions could be drawn to my actions.

    Murder.  That was the only option I saw at the time.  This was logical, but I doubted whether I could affect such a thing.  I speak not of guilt or the sanctity of human life.  I speak to my own inexperience with exacting such violence.  I to that date had only known the role of victimhood.

    The plague of doubt lasted days more.  I thought day and night, practicing the motions of stabbing knives and choking with barbed lengths of rope.  I settled on short, sharp blade, concealing it with the yellowed notes Doctor Faustus long ago disregarded.

    I then sat at the desk in my bedroom.  Before me was a brightly burning lantern, a lengthy parchment, and a new fountain pen purchased for the purpose of the letter I wrote.

My Dear Wagner,

Accept my apologies for my abrupt absence.  Our brave goal I achieved in the night.  In my haste, I leapt through without you.  Please forgive me.

As a token of my sincerity I ask that you and our laboratory boy drink equally from the flask included with this delivery.  The beverage is one of the many great discoveries I will share with you quite soon.

                                                            F         

    Satisfied with my forgery, I rolled the parchment, sealed it with a generic wax seal, and then tied an eccentric bow as was the custom for the time.  I affixed it to the bottle of smoked glass filled with the elixir.  As Wagner slept, I traveled to a neighboring village, paying handsomely for a courier who promised to not disclose the proximity of delivery, nor any description of the ugly one who placed it into his possession.

    The following day, the courier arrived and I answered the door to him.  Per our agreement, he made no recognition of me, asking if Wagner was there and present in the home.  I called to Wagner who came and accepted the delivery.

    An hour or so later, I noticed Wagner was titillated.  He danced around and about the house.  He sang, quite horribly, songs of love and joy and tragedy and sorrow.  After some time, he came to me as I fraudulently ordered him to do.
    
    “I received correspondence from Doctor Faustus.  He asks that you join me in sampling a special brew, insisting on it really.  Please join me at the dining table.”

    With that he walked away.  I erred in assuming our shared drink would take place in the lab.  He and I both ate and frequently slept there.  I prayed that this was my only miscalculation.  In contingency, I grabbed the lock and chain I set aside for my crime and left the concealed blade undisturbed on the weathered notes.

    On my way to the dining room, I made sure to pass through the kitchen where all of the house utensils were kept.  I found a carving knife of shining silver.  Thinking that to be sufficient, I slid the object into the belt at my side and let my shirt hang down over it.  I entered the dining room.

    Sitting at the table was Wagner, reading from the familiar my forgery.  When he saw I entered the room, he quickly rolled and concealed the instrument to his side.  I saw also the bottle delivered with the parchment.  It was unopened.  Two wine glasses were laid out across from one another.

    His attentions remained committed to the forged correspondence and its accompanying beverage.   I ran the chain through the spindles of the formidable chair and around my waist.  I closed the lock, leaving nary slack for my escape.  He paid such gross movement no mind and would suffer for that.

    “He has instructed that we each share equally in this bottle,” he said.

    “Thank you,” I responded.

    Wagner poured the drink into each of our glasses.  Immediately the air filled with that strong pungent odor of the perfected elixir.  My stomach turned in response to the foul stench or to the excitement and anticipation of my new beginning.

    “To our great mentor Johanne Faustus, may he return to us here post haste!” he shouted as if our lonely drink together was before an eager crowd.

    “To Faustus!” I shouted with feigned enthusiasm.

    A testament to his faith in our mentor, Wagner swallowed the elixir with not a hint of disgust visible.  His uncompromising devotion to Faustus triumphed over the wretched consistency and taste of the drink.  I was lacking in such grace.

    Rejected violently by my digestive tract, I vomited that of the elixir I swallowed back into my mouth. A scornful contempt filled his blank face.  It was that look, so like the look of Father that empowered me to consume the remainder of the elixir.

    We drank down the contents of the glasses.  And then the feeling I would pursue the remainder of this tale became known to me.

    My vision and other senses severed.  I felt no pain in my legs.  I felt nothing of my physical body though I looked to Wagner through the dull eyes of my youth.  I did so through choice and habit rather than necessity.

    Scared, I attempted to drift away from my mortal shell. A great generalized pressure engulfed me, as if swallowed by the surrounding air, and then the pressure broke.  With ease, I found I was quickly distinct from my body.  The physical and the metaphysical diverged at will.  I was moving closer to Wagner, what I could see of him, without stepping a foot on the floor or atop the table.  I was drifting unbound by gravity and reason.

    I was not in this physical world as you know it.  It was a separate state or realm.  I still saw the makings of the room, Wagner, the furnishings, the new art on each of the four walls, but everything was lacking in every degree of luster and color.  I can best describe the objects and Wagner as dimly faint replicas of those found in the mundane everyday.  I heard no sound, other than a pummeling wind of ice blowing neither from nor to any discernable direction.

    The cold was chilling, murderous really.  I sought immediate haven despite the pure undiscovered space in which I found myself.  In me, my spirit, essence, soul, or what have you, I felt a frantic terror as if I was falling from some great elevation.  I also felt an extreme sense of wrongdoing.  I was no more supposed to be on this plane than Eve was to devour the forbidden fruit.

    As I neared Wagner within inches, I mustered together courage and willed myself into his being.  I felt the same pressured resistance for less than a second and then I was passing into his living tissues, the coldness began to subside to the beat of his pulsating heart.  I filled his cavity, arms and legs, then fingers and toes.

    As the bonds between the physical and ethereal connected I became privy to all that was Wagner.  First, the connection was too frantic to gain any single bit of information.  Senseless colors and sounds swirled about.  After a moment, in a deluge, I saw all the vivid images of his life and felt the emotions of his memories.

    I saw his father help him climb the twisting limbs of an aged apple tree.  I felt the pain of the death of his first dog, an old cocker spaniel, Nickels.  I saw his first kiss of a school girl and the empty feelings inside him. I saw the discovery of his first science text.  I saw his proud father introduce him to a small crowd of well dressed aristocrats.  I saw images of a cousin whom Wagner had loved in a way criminal to the times.  I felt the pangs of lust he felt for Faustus.  I felt his contempt and jealousy of me –all of these things, and more, in a brave flash.

    In each I felt his glee and his sadness.  His flat affect gave no indication of the emotional being Wagner truly was.  Perhaps we all feel the same and only differ in the manner we reveal ourselves. 

    I desperately wanted to revel in the new world of sensation and emotion.  I wanted to swim in the sea of his experiences and feelings, but pressing matters stood at hand.  There existed one complication in the forbidden knowledge shared with me by that hellish Albino: the sacrifice of self.

    He was easy prey.  I was now tenfold the might of my old physical body and I went to pains to see that the bolt of terror would not render Wagner a titan even in my flawed frame.  The chain was strong and tight.  The iron belt negated his evasion of the plunging blade.

    Had one of such self-directed loathing known such satisfaction?  The confusion and terror drifted off from his face, my face, to be replaced by a mask of blank death.  His fold and fall toward the dining room floor induced in me an intoxicating joy.  I at last killed the defective boy.  For extra measure, I stomped the face of that dead thing quite hard with Wagner’s polished boot.  I did it again and again until the chair toppled over.

    In that moment I heard the rattling gates of heaven as they closed to me forever.  The decadent, worldly decision was eternal.  I was an enemy of God and an outlaw of hell.  The thing I became stood arrogantly outside the natural order.

    I ran his hands, now my hands, over the perfect contour of my face, then over the chest, arms, and then his buttocks and genitals.  I felt each sensation as my own.  Pain and pleasure came to me from my petting and pinching.

    I hurried to the ornate mirror of silver and gold hanging dominant on the parlor wall.  All of those handsome features bestowed upon Wagner in some accident of birth were now mine.  I smiled and frowned, scowled and laughed, and ended with a stern gaze into my new image.  The boy Sorren refused all reflective surfaces; he could not bare a single glimpse of himself, short and sickly.  Now I was tall and handsome.  My new body would turn the heads of women, and men, in every room into which I walked.  Those things remained inside, the ugliest place.

    Drunk on the remaining elixir in Wagner’s blood and all my new potential, I sang a song of playing German children from Wagner’s memory.   I made my return to the dining room were my old flesh-prison was still chained and crumpled on the floor.  The thing was even uglier with its nose crushed up and into its face.  

    I unlocked the chain from its cuffed waist.  With Wagner’s impressive strength and fitness at my command, I hoisted the frail dead figure onto my shoulder and carried it down to the darkened laboratory.

    With a lazy toss, I easily threw the body into a large tin vat Faustus and Wagner used for the mixing of chemical formulas and the collection of blood from smaller animals.  For the tub I had my own purposes.

    Collected on a table near the bath were an assortment of caustic reagents, acid and other corrosive juices, to devour the flesh of my old defective form.  This I had to do but what would I do after?

    I stayed there divided in the home of Faustus, torn in my longing for his return and equally terrified of his judgment.  The Knowledge the White Beast pledged to me shriveled to the abilities of Faustus.  His radical powers would penetrate the façade.  My new brilliance was a mere sleeved card.  At first sight, if not sooner, Faustus would know of my overtaking of Wagner in both body and mind.  Perhaps he already knew.  This was how it was with each sunrise, a subtle shifting between hope and fear.