Chapter 5 - The Pharmacist

The pharmacist hurries down the web as fast as its spindly limbs will carry him. Just ahead, a canopy of white slips are dangling on gooey threads of silk. He seizes the nearest one and stuffs it into its mouth.

Hurry, hurry, hurry! The thought is screaming in his head. His dozen eyes roll wildly in their sockets. The Lich’s recent warning echoes in his head.

The Commission! Oh gods, the Commission is coming!

The pharmacy is buzzing with pandemonium. The webs vibrate with the frantic fervor as a hundred pharmacists spin and mix their drugs. More doctors’ orders come floating down from the dark ether, twirling on gossamer webbing. Hurried black legs snatch them out of the air and devour them.

The first pharmacist feels a sudden, searing pain in his belly. Good, he thinks. The medicine is brewing. The pharmacist lowers an empty vial to its pincers, and a fluorescent green liquid seeps into the tube. When the sample is full, the pharmacist stoppers it and labels it quickly, then latches it to an empty tendril of webbing. With a quick tug on the rope, the medicine spins off into the darkness.

The pharmacist seizes the next order from the web. Its eyes whirl over words, converging a dozen kaleidoscopic scribbles into a sensible command. It stuffs the paper into its slavering jaws. Chews. Concentrates. Moments later, furious heat billows into its guts. The dark juices come dripping from its fangs. Another vial is filled to the brim and sent flying into the darkness.

The doctors’ orders continue to pour in from every wing of the hospital. A never-ending barrage of requests for delirium elixirs, tinctures of dysphoria, anaphylactoids and paralytics.

The pharmacist eyes a prescription for Agony and Ecstasy. It’s a simple enough formula. 0.5 ml black widow venom, 1 mg urticaceae gympie, and 1 mg/kg vecuronium. After a minute of hellacious fire in its bowels, the drug is mixed and ready to be secreted into its vial.

The next order is for Melancholia. Everyone is getting melancholia today, the pharmacist thinks as it squats over an empty vial. The dose requires 0.5 mg/kg rue de lunatique and 0.5 mg/kg echo triste. The pharmacist meticulously scribbles Do not serve with absinthe on the label before sending the medicine whirling away.

More paper orders came fluttering through the darkness like little white bats. The pharmacist seizes the closest one and frowns at this doctor’s particularly illegible writing. Hemorrhoidal cream or hemorrhagic cream, he wonders?

There’s no time to dawdle. Hurry, hurry, hurry! The pharmacist makes an educated guess and squats over a vial.

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Read on - Chapter 6