The Alchemyst Read Online Free Page A

his back and shoulders aching. He held out two crumpled pages to Nick. “Well, he didn’t get all of it. When he pulled the book out of my hand, I guess I must have been holding on to these.”
    Fleming snatched the pages from Josh’s hand with an inarticulate cry. Dropping to the floor, he brushed away shredded books and shattered shelving and laid the two pages on the floor side by side. His long-fingered hands were trembling slightly as he smoothed the pages flat. The twins knelt on the floor on either side of him, staring intently at the pages…and trying to make sense of what they were seeing. “And we’re certainly not imagining
that,
” Sophie whispered, tapping the page with her index finger.
    The thick pages were about six inches across by nine inches long and were composed of what looked like pressed bark. Tendrils of fibers and leaves were clearly visible in the surface, and both were covered with jagged, angular writing. The first letter at the top left-hand corner of each page was beautifully illuminated in gold and red, while the rest of the words were written in reddish black ink.
    And the words were moving.
    Sophie and Josh watched as the letters shifted on the page like tiny beetles, shaping and reshaping themselves, becoming briefly almost legible in recognizable languages like Latin or Old English, but then immediately dissolving and re-forming into ancient-looking symbols not unlike Egyptian hieroglyphs or Celtic Ogham.
    Fleming sighed. “No, you’re not imagining that,” he said finally. He reached down the neck of his T-shirt and pulled out a pair of pincenez on a length of black cord. The pincenez were old-fashioned glasses without arms, designed to perch on the bridge of the nose. Using the spectacles as magnifying glasses, Nick moved them across the wriggling, shifting words.
“Ha!”
    “Good news?” Josh asked.
    “Excellent news. He’s missing the Final Summoning.” He squeezed Josh’s bruised shoulder, making him wince. “If you had wanted to take two pages from the book, rendering it useless, then you could not have chosen better than these.” The broad smile faded from his face. “And when Dee finds out, he’ll be back, and I guarantee you he will not just bring Golems with him next time.”
    “Who
was
the gray man?” Sophie asked. “Perry also called him Dee.”
    Gathering up the pages, Nick stood. Sophie turned to look at him and realized that he suddenly looked old and tired, incredibly tired. “The gray man was Dr. John Dee, one of the most powerful and dangerous men in the world.”
    “I’ve never heard of him,” Josh said.
    “To remain unknown in this modern world: that, indeed, is real power. Dee is an alchemist, a magician, a sorcerer and a necromancer, and they are not all the same thing.”
    “Magic?” Sophie asked.
    “I thought there was no such thing as magic,” Josh said sarcastically, and then immediately felt foolish, after what he’d just seen and experienced.
    “Yet you have just fought creatures of magic: the Golems are men created of mud and clay, brought to life by a single word of power. In this century, I’ll wager there are less than half a dozen people who have even seen a Golem, let alone survived an encounter with one.”
    “Did Dee bring them to life?” Sophie asked.
    “Creating Golems is easy; the spell is as old as humanity. Animating them is a little harder and controling them is practically impossible.” He sighed. “But not for Dr. John Dee.”
    “Who is he?” she pressed.
    “Dr. John Dee was Court Magician during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I in England.”
    Sophie laughed shakily, not entirely sure whether to believe Nick Fleming. “But that was centuries ago; the gray man couldn’t have been older than fifty.”
    Nick Fleming crawled around on the floor, pushing through books until he found the one he wanted.
England in the Age of Elizabeth.
He flipped it open: on the page facing an image of Queen Elizabeth I was an