The Blackwood Curse: Queen of Corruption

by Melissa McCann

  The next day, I opened my front door and all but trampled a little boy on the stoop. He hopped up. "Hi Mr. Crompton. I'm Nathan Greene, remember?"

  I recognized the thin face and knobby limbs. "I remember."

  "Claire read me that book you said. About how Boo Radley was lonely, so Scout and Jem were friends with him."

  My brow contracted. "That's not exactly how I remember the story."

  "I made you a picture. Claire said you wouldn't like it, but I said you would 'cause I draw really good."

  The older sister stood on the sidewalk with her back to us, arms folded, clearly washing her hands of the whole affair and radiating disapproval in every line of her sturdy back.

  "She's not scared of you. She just thinks you don't want to be friends." He rolled his eyes and shook his head at the perversity of the female mind.

  Then Nathan pulled from his front jeans pocket a much-folded and wrinkled sheet of child's drawing paper which he opened and presented to me like a general handing out a silver star.

  I supposed the central figure must have been meant to represent me. It wore a cape and a mask that covered one side of its face.

  "I gave you a mask 'cause you've got to hide your secret identity," Nathan explained.

  The figure flourished a flaming broadsword like a rapier.

  "What am I riding?" I asked.

  "It's a unicorn pegasus."

  The animal looked something like a rhinoceros. "And the wings?"

  "So it can fly," he explained in that tone of voice usually reserved for someone who has been a little bit stupid.

  The girl finally turned around. "Okay, you gave him the picture. Now come on."

  "I gotta go because Claire has Karate, and if she's late, she'll tell Mom on me." He rolled his eyes again.

  The girl came up the walk, seized him by the arm and grimaced in my direction. "Sorry, Mr. Crompton." She dragged her little brother off while he waved back at me in a cheerful, manly way.

  I looked again at the crayon drawing on rumpled paper. Myself, caped and masked, on a flying rhinoceros with the child's name—Nathan Greene—carefully cursived in green crayon in the lower right corner. It was really quite well done for his age. The child had captured the curve of raptors' wings and the splay of feathers at the ends. My cape billowed in windblown folds, and the face was recognizably mine even with the mask concealing the scars, and if he'd never seen a live horse, he'd still given the animal a fiery tilt to its odd-shaped head.

  It would have to be mounted on the refrigerator door, and my mother would sniffle every time she looked at it. I sighed. There was no help for it. I pinned the illustration on the refrigerator with a magnet and made a second attempt at my afternoon walk.

  I meant to demand from Alistair an explanation for his previous night's excursion, but when I limped into his room, I found him in a fit of excitement. He seized my injured hand so hard I flinched. "There you are, Henry," he cried as if he hadn't seen me for a dozen years. "The moment has come to bring you into my plans."

  His cheeks had hollowed since I last saw him in daylight only a few days earlier. The shadows under his sunken eyes made them seem to burn out of their orbits like those of a cat.

  I took my accustomed seat by the window, noting as I did the ragged leatherbound book that lay open as if Alistair had tossed it casually aside at my knock. It was about the size of a small bible. The dark leather of the cover was so soft it curled, and the pages themselves were limp with age. Quilled drawings in faded ink covered the two pages visible to me, and around them I recognized Alistair's scratchy handwriting. He habitually used a fountain pen. He had experimented with quills in our youth, but even he couldn’t bear so much inconvenience in the name of romance.

  Presuming it to be the volume he had carried and consulted the night before. I reached for the book, meaning to look more closely at the pages, but Alistair caught it up, removed it to a nearby cabinet and shut it out of sight with a quick glance over his shoulder to be sure I recognized the secret significance of the act.

  That look shouldn't have made the hairs rise on the backs of my arms. It was just Alistair playing out one of his fantasies. I had meant to speak up, confess my surveillance, and ask him what he meant by creeping around Woodhill before disappearing into thin air, but that theatrically secretive look dried up the words in my throat.

  Instead, I leaned back and pretended I had noticed nothing peculiar. "So, Alistair," I said. "What has kept you occupied since I last saw you? No doubt you have been absorbed in some adventure."

  This speech made him smile and shutter his eyes like a cat, and he sat opposite me. "I suppose you remember everything I have told you before."

  "The story is burned into my memory. I cannot escape it even in my dreams."

  He stiffened. "Your dreams?"

  My hackles rippled again. Warned by overstrung nerves, I veered away from the ticklish subject. "I was powerfully affected by your mention of a creature called Samoth which, residing in a pit, I seem to have associated with Alice in Wonderland falling down the rabbit hole."

  Alistair's suspicion crumbled, and he raised his hands in despair. "I open your mind to realms beyond belief, and you return to me with children's tales. Alice in Wonderland indeed. "

  I sighed like a maiden in a melodrama. "But you've been so reticent with your explanations."

  "That is true," he said. "That is undeniably true, and yet..."

  "Forgive me for making light of your story. I assure you I receive your every word in a spirit of greatest solemnity."

  Some of the high color faded from his cheeks. "I'm sorry, Henry. I'm weary—weary to my soul, and I have lived so long in peril of my life there are times when every face appears to hide some dark treachery. But you are the one person who has never betrayed my trust."

  This gave me a guilty twinge, coming as it did after my spying on him the previous night.

  He settled somewhat into his storyteller's persona. "You know I had learned everything there was of importance to know about the ancient gods. I had learned their names and natures and their hierarchy, although they have no very strict order of pre-eminence among them. I had also learned that which was most pertinent to me, which was the location of their prison."

  I nodded.

  "My difficulty then seemed insurmountable because the great race had done its work too well. They separated that plane from this one by a thousand, thousand others. Since that time, I have studied night and day until I at last seized on a path by which I might find my way to the Valley of Shadows where sleep mighty Samoth and Yog-Sothoth and a thousand others."

  I frowned at his mention of Samoth. Hadn't I just been thinking of that dream in which I trembled on a stair overhanging a pit?

  Alistair hadn't observed my reaction. "Among the calendars of the Mayans and the Atlantians, the star charts of the Sumerians and the Egyptians, I found a sign that soon, very soon, the spinning of the worlds around and through each other would bring into alignment the route by which a man might travel safely to the resting place of the old gods."

  My hands tightened on the arms of my chair. "But you can't hop back and forth between dimensions. We'd see people popping in and out like moles in a garden." Or turning corners that weren't corners.

  Alistair tossed his head. "The ordinary man can no more see these intersections than he can detect microwave radiation with his naked eye. It takes a person of a peculiar...call it...an affinity...to tread those paths, and even so, that mind must be so highly trained and disciplined you may never expect to encounter another such as mine."

  I thought I already knew the answer to my next question. "And have you found such an intersection?"

  "Found one!" He said. "Found one? I have found hundreds."

  My chest tightened. "Do you mean to say you have been jigging around in other dimensions for, what, for months? Years?"

  He leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs, his hands steady now. "Not years assuredly. But
months? Yes, it has been a few months now."

  "And have you found the valley?" If this were true, maybe I was both mad and not. I heard the mocking voice of Alice's Cheshire Cat in my head. We're all mad here.

  "Not yet," Alistair said offhandedly. "You can be sure I have found myself in some marvelous places, and by diligent study, I have been able to give names to some of those worlds and divine their natures, but it was not until last night that I found the portal, the key to the labyrinth, the door that opens the way. I'm sure now that I can find my way into that world where is hidden the Valley of Shadow where the old gods sleep in their temples. It will not be another month before I look down on their cold palaces of stone."

  If this was not one of his stories, then he was insane. I hadn't seen him disappear into a fold of light and shadow last night. Alistair must be brought back to reality.

  "Alistair, you don't need to find these gods or whatever they are. If you shared with the world what you have already discovered, you'd be a prince among the greatest scientists in the world. No, not a prince, a king." I stooped over him and seized the arms of his chair in my urgency. "No good can come of tampering with old gods." I almost forgot we were talking about a delusion.

  Alistair gaped. Red flags of color flared on ashy cheeks. His mouth worked until he finally found his voice. "Traitor," he hissed with spittle spraying out onto his chin. "I have opened my mind to you, and you turn against me?"

  "To save you, Alistair," I cried, jerking at the arms of his chair as if I could shake sense into him.

  He shoved me away and jumped up, overturning the chair. "Who are you to think of saving me? I invite you to join me as a prince of the universe, and you can only think of saving me?"

  I said, "Alistair, I fear for your life and your sanity."

  He flung his hand toward the door. "Get out."

  He was too much enraged to hear any further argument, so I pulled rein on my own temper and left him alone.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I left Blackwood House determined to get far away from Alistair before I forgot his frailty and hit him anyway. If he adhered to his usual pattern, he would recover his temper in a day or two and have no memory of our having quarreled.

  Meanwhile, I had no more idea which one of us was the maddest. I didn’t feel myself to be insane or delusional. That I doubted myself at all seemed to confirm my sanity, but I couldn’t resolve my supposed sanity with the incontrovertible fact that one simply couldn’t dodge around among alternate universes. It was the stuff of science-fiction, and it hadn’t been covered in SOF training.

  I should have left Alistair strictly alone until he recovered his temper, but my nerves wound tighter with every hour as if I were waiting for an assault I knew was coming. As sunset faded to indigo, I said to my mother, "My leg feels stiff. I think I'll have a walk."

  Her brow furrowed. “You’d better leave poor Alistair to play his games alone. He’s long since grown up enough to take care of himself."

  I shrugged. "I hate to think he got the best of me last night.”

  She shook her head, looking out the window. Finally, she sighed and rose from her rocker. "Well then, get a warm coat, and I'll put the last of the tea in a thermos."

  Despite my twitching nerves, I dared to roll my eyes behind her back. "It's an intelligence mission, Mother, not a picnic."

  She made me wait while she prepared a midnight snack sufficient sustain me for a hard day’s march. When I had the thermos tucked in one pocket of my coat and a packet of cookies and roast beef sandwiches in the other, I went out into a looming night overlooked by the fattening moon.

  I waited in the opaque shadow of a maple for Alistair to appear from the alley behind Blackwood House. He went immediately to the point of his previous departure. On the street near the curb where he had disappeared the night before, he looked up at the moon hanging above the trees and back to something on the pavement in front of him. I leaned forward, almost daring exposure.

  Suddenly, Alistair stepped forward. This time, I fixed my gaze, determined to miss nothing, so I saw clearly when he turned a corner in midair and disappeared. I couldn’t understand what I saw. He had turned neither right nor left but some other direction that didn’t make sense to my eyes. I sprang from my hiding place. I couldn’t have been more than three seconds behind Alistair when I crossed the confluence of line and shadow that marked the place where he had disappeared.

  Braced for a sensation of some kind—a jolt, a drop, a moment of disorientation—I almost tripped when I merely staggered along the street uninterrupted. Getting my balance, I looked around for some sign that I might have gone somewhere else. So far as I could tell, Woodhill remained unchanged. Not a tree or leaf out of place and no sign of Alistair anywhere. He couldn’t have outrun me, even half crippled as I was. I had been only seconds behind him. I could draw only one conclusion: he had gone, and I hadn’t.

  And yet it remained impossible.

  If he had really gone somewhere, he must come back. This time I would wait out his return however long it took. I stood watch until five o'clock when the sun began to cast a gray radiance over the neighborhood, but Alistair didn’t reappear. Finally, I gave up and hobbled home to my mother's house, kicked off my shoes and collapsed on my little bed with my coat over me.

  My mother had gone out to clean Blackwood House before I woke. I met her at the door when she came back. "Was Alistair home?" I asked as I held the door for her.

  "I saw him with my own eyes when I went in to dust and straighten up his room."

  "He disappeared again last night the same way he did before."

  She turned her back to me and hung her purse on the coatrack beside the door, taking an extra moment to straighten it. "I hate to see you lose your sleep over a prank born in that poor boy's disordered mind."

  "If it is real and I’m not hallucinating, then it’s more than a prank."

  She went to the table where I had laid out tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches—more or less the pinnacle of my culinary gifts.

  “Why don't you leave Alistair to himself for a while,” she suggested. “Spend more time with the little Fee girl you've been walking out with.”

  I sat across from her. “I'm not walking out with anyone.” Least of all unearthly Mora with the rarified atmosphere she carried with her.

  “Her mother says she isn't seeing anybody right now.”

  “Mother, look at me. Children scream and run away when I’m on the street.”

  “That nice little Greene boy drew you a lovely picture.”

  “I look like a monster out of a fairy tale.”

  “Beauty and the Beast,” she answered. “Now phone up little Mora and ask her out to the movies.”

  Mad I might be, but not mad enough to invite Mora to the movies. Nevertheless, I had developed the habit of walking past the library whenever I went out for my daily exercise. I disciplined myself to expect nothing, neither to see her nor, if she did return, to expect more from her than friendship, or at least pity. Nevertheless, my heart sped when, approaching the library, I recognized the sheer black shine of her hair at the foot of the narrow stairs.

  She sat on the lowest steps with her arms curled around long bare legs and her eyes on the toes of her white sneakers. Her bags and books and laptop lay around her feet.

  I debated whether to turn around and pretend I hadn’t seen her, but I lost the initiative. She looked up, saw me and unfolded from the bottom stair, so I had no choice but to limp up to her as if she didn’t throw the world off its axis and leave me groundless.

  “Waiting for someone?” I asked. I supposed, actually, that her Mad Hatter must have promised to meet her here. If he had left her sitting on the stoop, it served him right that I’d found her first. Footless as I felt, I meant to hold onto her at least as far as her bus.

  She flushed a deep red. “I anticipated you might adhere to a routine, in which case you could be expected to pass this point within a relatively pred
ictable time frame.”

  My world tilted on a new axis.

  She squatted and set to collecting bags, books and baggage, shifting things from hand to hand and dropping one item in the process of picking up the next. I intercepted the computer. She started and looked up, blinking rapidly. I slung the laptop over my shoulder on its strap and appropriated a stack of her books as well. “You’re going to your bus?”

  She stared up at me for a moment, then she jerked her head in a nod, so I turned toward the fringe of Woodhill and led the way. “Why were you waiting for me?”

  Mora had found her way to my right side, which meant she was looking at my ruined features.

  “I read the books you indicated.”

  “Which books?” I twisted my head to see the titles of the ones I carried for her, but they all seemed to be about math.

  “The ones you advised me to read: Winnie-the-Pooh, The Wizard of Oz, and Alice in Wonderland. I supposed you intended me to read the looking-glass story as well.”

  “I wasn’t assigning a reading list,” I said. I began to find my footing in the innocuous subject despite the oddity of the little math-nerd having read a handful of children’s stories merely because I had mentioned them.

  She squeezed the books in her arms as if she were bracing herself. “I’m prepared to discuss them if you like.”

  I stiffened my lips against a laugh. “Did you like them?”

  She furrowed her brows, glanced at me and looked away again. Finally, she said, cautiously, “What is the intent of the question?”

  How had I got through a whole semester of her tutoring without realizing she didn’t know how to read fiction? “Did you like Dorothy?”

  She relaxed and raised her chin. “The author evidently intended to make a play on words in the name of the protagonist Dorothy Gale—a gale being a hurricane-force wind of approximately the power of a weak tornado, which he represents as the means of transportation to the putative fairy country of Oz. I found the proposal of such a country impersuasive given the proliferation of modern air travel and satellite surveillance.” She flicked her eyes toward me for a verdict.