Too Cold For Snow

dumb canes, poinsettias and philodendrons. Mixed in with innocuous plants of course, a little floral dressing in his deadly arbor.
    He lit the small methylated spirits burner, the ghostly blue light of the flames above the wide wick reflecting on the pregnant curves of the thick amaryllis bulb which lay on the chopping board. He cut through it with dispatch, his fingers animated like a puppeteer. He then started the process that would yield pretty high grade lycorine – not a deadly poison but one which could make someone very, very ill, enough to regret each next breath. He thought of the yobs who had spray-canned his shop and imagined how his next guinea pigs, for a drop of two of tincture injected into a six pack of lagers left as if dropped accidentally, might wear hooded fleece and backward-facing baseball caps. He might adulterate a whole case of bottled beers with it, leave it somewhere obvious for their delectation and his delight.
    The liquids vaporised and condensed three times. He had faith in the rituals of the old alchemists, like his great-great-great-uncle Morgan Llwyd ap Gruffudd ap Fychan, the presiding genius over a mid Wales court so ancient that even the Welsh – with their astonishing regard for such things – could not remember its origins. Whenever Morgan experimented – working on his thesis that gold was an alloy of lead and copper, a metallic marriage that could be sundered by the right acid under the right conditions – he swore by doing everything three times. Tri chynnig i Gymro , went the old proverb. Three tries for a Welshman. Krink trusted the clarity of his ancestor’s vision. You probably do see things more clearly through one good eye. Morgan’s experiments had claimed the other.
    Warming to the exactitude of his task Krink prepared a noxious cocktail – crown of thorns, Jerusalem cherry and devil’s backbone, mashed and juiced, cooked up and cooled down. Tri chynnig i wenwynwr . And three for the poisoner.
    Having transferred the liquid into a pipette he then filled dinky serum phials with the pale amber liquid. He took three pieces of fresh chicken liver from the fridge and walked out into the night to do some field trials.
    Vaulting the iron gates at the top end of the park, he enjoyed the jasmine tang of the June night. A hedgehog bustled along the edge of the rose garden, intent on insects. Krink crouched down behind the wall that abutted the terrace of houses and injected the liver with poison. He then walked away into the cover of a copse from where he trained his infrared binoculars. He estimated that it would take two minutes for the first moggie to slink in and even though the first animal was ten seconds late it gave Krink some satisfaction that he’d pretty much worked out how long it would take for the molecules of liver scent to drift and scatter on the slow breeze. It was a bloated tom with a fat testicular swagger that realised that there was more than one piece of meat, its body vacillating with indecision. It struck out to the left, towards the largest piece and hunkered down to enjoy this unexpected midnight snack. ‘Four seconds,’ murmured Krink as he saw the first torn-off chunk slide down the epiglottis. Then the cat’s whole frame seemed as if it would explode. It spasmed and died. Krink reckoned that ten times the dose and a human would be French bread in twenty seconds. Another cat shadowed its way across the grass. Krink didn’t bother watching this one. He’d done enough open-air animal lab for one night.
    In his dreams he flew with shearwaters, his animal familiars, across an ocean, when a huge gale threw them skywards like crackled paper above a bonfire. Birds scattergunned topsy-turvily in all directions and after what seemed liked an aeon of being storm-tossed, sometimes turned upside down by the strength of the wind, Krink found himself above an ice cap. Beneath him there were caterpillar tracks in the snow and as the Krink-bird started to drop through the air because of exhaustion he saw the ridged hump of a research station. As luck would have it, his feathered body crumpling into a snow drift, a Norwegian geologist was passing by and came over to pick up this little bird so much like an albatross and pushed it down within the warm fleece lining of his parka coat. When Krink woke, shivering, it was not from the memory of the arctic temperature but rather from the image of being cupped with great tenderness between two gloved