The Apothecary by Maile Meloy Read Free Book Online Page A

you a message. He works for the Soviet embassy.”
    The apothecary shook his head. “I don’t have time to explain, Benjamin. I have to hide the book.”
    “What book?”
    The apothecary answered by pulling a large leather-bound volume from a cupboard. Then we heard the locked door rattling in the front of the shop. “They’re here!” he said. “You both have to hide.” He set down the book to lift an iron grate in the floor, revealing stairs leading down to a cellar.
    “I’m not going down there!” Benjamin said.
    “You’ll go now ,” his father said, with a sharpness I hadn’t imagined he was capable of. As if he had just had the desperate thought, he thrust the book into Benjamin’s hands.
    “We can stay and help you fight them!” Benjamin said.
    “Go!” his father said.
    “We’ll go get the police,” I said.
    “No police! I need you to protect the Pharmacopoeia and keep it safe. Please do this thing for me.”
    “Protect it from what?” Benjamin asked.
    “Anyone who comes looking for it.”
    “What about you?”
    “I’ll be all right. Just take care of the book. It’s been in our family for seven hundred years.”
    “Dad, wait!”
    “I have a plan. I’ll be fine. Just go.” The apothecary lowered the grate after us. Someone was pounding at the front door.
    The cellar smelled like damp earth, and we found ourselves at the bottom of the stairs in a concrete-floored room. Enough light came down through the iron grate that we could see a little of what was around us. There were shelves lined with dusty jars, and there was a heavy iron door in one of the walls. Benjamin tried the door handle, but it was locked.
    I heard a violent explosion upstairs, and it made us both crouch behind the shelves. There were footsteps and voices, speaking what sounded like German.
    “Do you understand them?” I asked.
    Benjamin shook his head.
    We listened while the men searched the office. I could hear Benjamin’s breathing in the dark, and my own, which was unsteady. He looked at the heavy book on his knees, and I knew he was wondering if it was worth more than his father’s life. I could tell he wanted to go upstairs and fight.
    “There are too many of them,” I whispered. “Your father said to keep the book safe.”
    We waited what seemed a long time, then heard a scraping of metal above us, and Benjamin pulled me back further into the dusty shadows behind the shelves. The grate was pulled away, and a man’s head peered into the cellar. He had a long scar across one cheek, and the hideousness of a face hanging upside down. He seemed to be grinning, or gritting his teeth: They were bared in the dim light as he looked around. Then we heard the clang of a police car’s bell on the street, and someone shouted in German. It was clear that the voice was urging the others to leave. The horrible upside-down face disappeared, and the grate was lowered again.
    Benjamin and I crouched in the darkness, barely daring to breathe. As the immediate terror faded, I realised that his arm was across my shoulders, and the side of my body against his. He seemed to become aware of it, too, and he relaxed his grip on my arm. We moved an inch apart and my arm tingled where his fingers had been. The police bell had faded into the distance: They must have been after someone else.
    When the shop was silent above us, Benjamin and I crept back out, pushing the heavy grate open. The place had been ransacked. Papers were thrown on the floor, drawers opened, chairs toppled. Broken jars of herbs filled the air with sharp, strange smells. Things had been pulled off the shelves in the front of the shop: bottles of pills, boxes of bandages, bags of cotton wool.
    The apothecary was gone.

CHAPTER 8
    The Pharmacopoeia

    B enjamin and his father lived in a flat above the shop, and we decided that it would surely be watched. So we went to my flat, where my parents were sitting at the card table we’d set up near the tiny kitchen. I could