The Blackwood Curse: Queen of Corruption

by Melissa McCann

  “You're a little like her,” I suggested.

  Her eyes widened with comprehension. “I see. One is supposed to form associative relationships between the narrative and one's own experience.”

  I turned her remark over in my head for a minute. “Actually, that's right.”

  She couldn't have looked more pleased if she had discovered the mathematical formula for peanut-butter.

  “No one ever talked about books with you?” I asked.

  She was looking directly at me now, her gaze intently focused. “I would not have seen the point of Winnie-the-Pooh as a child. Now, of course, I recognize the character as the expression of a juvenile interaction with the world as essentially lacking an awareness of risk which will become evident during the process of maturation.”

  She was good at talking when she found something to interest her. “I'm a bear of very little brain,” I quoted, “And long words bother me.”

  She scowled. “You are not Winnie-the-Pooh.”

  “Piglet?”

  She chuffed a short breath. “The White Knight.”

  “The White Knight?” I laughed, unsure whether or not I should be offended by her comparison of me to that feckless creature of Wonderland. “Aren’t I more like Humpty-Dumpty? All the king’s horses and all the king’s men…”

  “Humpty-Dumpty is broken,” she said. “The White Knight is merely encumbered.”

  I congratulated myself on my self-control in that I didn’t look at the bags and bundles of odds and ends that weighed her down until she could hardly walk without tipping over. “Encumbered with what?” I asked.

  She had slackened her clutch on her books. “Possibly your perception of yourself as being fundamentally flawed by your maturational process under wartime conditions.”

  The smile dropped from my face, and suddenly, I couldn’t speak. The moment went on a little too long, and Mora stepped to one side, putting more distance between us. “Is it inappropriate to reference the psychological impact of military service?” she asked. I heard the uneasiness and wished I could smile, or at least turn and look at her, but I didn’t know what my face would say.

  Hesitantly, she said, “I have researched the subject, but I don’t have a comprehensive understanding. Possibly I lack the requisite background?”

  “It’s fine.” I managed to turn my head and force a smile onto the good side of my face.

  We had reached her bus, and she took her burdens back from me. “What books will we discuss next time?” she asked.

  Heat flushed outward from the center of my chest. There was going to be a next time. Mora Fee—elusive genius loci of the libraries—alluded to an indefinite next time. “I never meant you to take it as an assignment.”

  She settled the strap of the laptop more securely over her shoulder. “It would be futile to expect you to discuss quantum mathematics.”

  It might have been better to discourage any further relationship. Her reference to the psychological impact of military service had crushed my delusions of a friendship innocent of my past. Her lucid, green-grey eyes locked on my face as if she had gathered up her courage to complete a task, so I said, “The Chronicles of Narnia. C.S. Lewis, a theologian. Read them in order of publication first.” I could hardly wait to see what associations she made from that.

  I waited with her until she climbed on her bus before turning toward home. I had won a battle and lost a war in a single conversation. She wanted—or had taken on the obligation—to offer me some kind of friendship the same way she had taken on the obligation to tutor me in geometry, but she was still the untainted little math-nerd she had always been, and I wasn’t the high-school golden boy who could have brought her into my circle, introduced her to my friends and made them see her as something other than a skinny girl with more brains than social grace. I tried to imagine her, quiet and a little bored, among my peers, but I found I didn’t like the picture. Like Alice, she belonged more to Wonderland than to the ordinary world, and I no longer seemed to entirely belong anywhere.

  When dark fell that evening, I waited for Alistair in the shelter of the hydrangea. He came as he had twice before, waited for a sign I couldn’t see and, anticlimactic now, turned a corner neither right nor left and disappeared. After his departure, I planted myself where Alistair had stood and peered into the convergence of light and shadow where I had last seen him.

  As I stared with slitted eyes, I thought I might be able to see, just barely, something folding and unfolding in empty air. Then I must have blacked out for a moment because my next sensation was of landing on my back in the middle of the street. Physical conditioning saved me from striking my head hard enough to knock myself senseless, but I had lost my balance in an instinctive leap backward to escape whatever I had seen. I’d knocked out my own wind, and my heart beat so hard it shook my ribs. A headache had bloomed behind my right eye.

  I couldn’t remember what I had actually seen. Something had made my mind slippery, and the sight had been too terrible to retain. My diaphragm relaxed from its spasm and allowed me to suck in a gasp of wind. I rolled to my feet. Again, I confronted Alistair’s door.

  My skin crawled, and sweat slicked my palm. At the junction where Alistair had disappeared, something seemed to meet the world at an unnatural angle altogether alien to any geometry Mora had ever taught me. It violated instinct and overpowered upstart reason like the eight-legged advance of a spider or the looping glide of a serpent over sand. My chest clenched, my heart beat hard enough to crowd my lungs, and the pain behind my eye sharpened to a needle piercing my optic nerve.

  I had no interest in traveling the universes in pursuit of monsters, but Alistair had gone through this, whatever it was. I strode forward, expecting to fall through, like Alice through her looking-glass, and tumble into some terrible backward kingdom, but as it had on every other occasion, my foot landed on the pavement precisely where it should have. I turned no corner, felt no alteration in my relation to the universe. Alistair had gone through his gateway, leaving me alone on Woodhill’s darkened street with creeping night winding around my shoulders and the half-formed moon glaring down with one horrified eye.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The following afternoon, I went out for my daily exercise. No sign of Mora at the library, so I quartered the neighborhood with no particular end in mind. Woodhill felt untenanted. The morning breeze had dissipated, and the air felt stifling to breathe. The first time my hackles pricked, I froze. I had seen or felt something that shouldn’t be there. I studied my surroundings but saw nothing I wouldn’t expect. I must have imagined something and startled myself.

  Half a block later, I glimpsed movement from the corner of my weak right eye and jerked away. When I looked directly at the spot, a man-sized piece of the world bloomed like an origami rose in the middle of the air over the sidewalk. I recoiled and almost fell backward before I caught myself on my cane. A throb behind my eye made it water, and I wiped the flow of tears from my cheek before trying to focus again.

  The thing beamed and dazzled at a frequency I could only interpret as black luminance. Ice-water ran down my spine at the sight of it. I backed further and turned just in time to stop myself stepping through another eruption of invisible light. I tried to spin away and stopped short in the face of a third. I knew before I looked that a fourth had unfolded behind me.

  I had seen a shadow of something like this last night when I stared into the space through which Alistair had disappeared. I still couldn’t see the unfolding corners, not in any way that really involved my eyes. They had no color that registered on my retina. I could only interpret it as unlight that wasn’t black but non-reality like shards of mirror reflecting nothing.

  Trapped, I forced myself to slow my breathing. I gritted my teeth and raised my arm. My skin crawled in anticipation, but I reached into the seething, un-light radiance in front of me.

  Nothing happened. The un-light mandala rotated through, or past, or around my hand, but I felt nothing
. I saw my hand clearly as if there were no endlessly unfolding break in the universe in front of me.

  I drew my hand back unharmed. Then, tightening my sweating fingers on my cane, I took a running step forward, directly into the un-light with no idea whether I would land in my own world or not.

  The dreadful blooming corner might as well have been a figment of my imagination. I caught my balance and turned. It hung in space behind me, rotating and revolving, invisible except as a color that wouldn’t stay in my head long enough to remember.

  I didn’t understand the situation, didn’t have the weapons or information to deal with it. Call it panic or tactical retreat; I ran in my clumsy half-skip toward home and cover, but I went no more than half a block before a dozen of those hideous corners shuffled out around the cracks in the sidewalk like a pack of cards building itself into a nightmare castle.

  I tried to avert my eyes, but lines and angles usheaved everywhere I looked. Pain pierced my right eye like a bayonet and stabbed through my head. My knees buckled, and I lost my grip on my cane. I caught myself on one hand and buried my eyes in the crook of my elbow.

  I stayed that way a while, trying to shake the pain out of my head without uncovering my eyes.

  “Mr. Crompton?”

  I recognized the voice. It was the Greene girl, Claire, the fresh-faced blond in shorts and athletic shoes, and I knew before I heard it that the next voice would be her brother Nathan saying, “Mr. Crompton, are you okay? You musta fell down.”

  Steady hands closed around my biceps on the left, and lighter fingers plucked my right sleeve. “Did you fall, Mr. Crompton?’ Claire asked. “Did you hurt your head? If you hit your head, you might have a concussion.”

  “How come he might have a concussion?” her brother asked.

  “Because that’s what happens when you hit your head.”

  “Like when Dad fell off the roof?”

  “It’s just a headache,” I said. The bayonet withdrew a few inches but remained fixed in my eye socket.

  “Nate, you better call nine-one-one,” Claire said.

  I stiffened. “Don’t do that. It will get better in a minute.” I didn’t need a hospital with tests and scans; I needed to get back to base where I could reassess.

  “We could help him get home,” Nathan suggested. “Like a blind dog.”

  “Guide dog,” Claire said. “I guess we could do that.” She sounded doubtful. “Gimme the phone.”

  “No hospital,” I said.

  “I’m gonna call my mom.”

  While the girl dialed, I cocked my head toward the place where the boy had been last time he spoke. “Can you see anything wrong around here?” I didn’t know how to describe the alien, unnatural angles. When they weren’t in front of me, I couldn’t form a clear picture of them in my head. “Like black light? Black shadows? Like shuffling cards?”

  The little boy took enough time to give our surroundings a thorough look. “Nuh-uh, Mr. Crompton.”

  If the children didn’t see them, I could be having visual hallucinations. That suggested something wrong with either my eyes or my head. Maybe I should let Claire call for an ambulance after all.

  Then Claire was talking to someone. “He’s got a really bad headache, and he’s seeing stuff.” She listened for a moment.

  “He says like black stuff.” Another silence.

  “Um…no, he talks okay,” Claire reported, “…and the good side of his face looks okay. I can’t tell the other side.” She paused. “Mr. Crompton, do you know where you are and who’s the president?”

  She reported that I did. From her competence and that of the person at the other end of the line, I concluded that Mrs. Greene must be a medical professional of some kind.

  “Mr. Crompton, can you stand up?”

  I demonstrated that I could do so, and Nathan shoved my cane into my free hand.

  “Uh-huh,” Claire reported. “He’s not jerking or shaking or anything.” She paused again.

  “Mr. Crompton, do you have migraines or really bad headaches a lot?”

  “Headaches,” I reported. Headaches had been a regular occurrence since I was hurt, but nothing like this.

  Claire passed that along to her mother, then she said, “Mr. Crompton, my mom says it’s probably a migraine, and we should help you get home, and she’s going to call Mrs. Crompton, but she says we should stay with you and make sure you don’t get worse or stop breathing or something.”

  “Don’t worry, Mr. Crompton,” Nathan chirped. “Our mom’s a veterinarian.”

  With the help of my “blind dogs,” I stumbled a few times on the way but got to my mother’s apartment without other accident.

  In my mother’s living room, I rolled onto the daybed under the window. Then I had to push myself up on one elbow and paw at the drawer in the table at the head of my bed, all without uncovering my eyes. I found the pharmacist’s bottle I kept there for when the pain in my hip got too bad to bear, uncapped it and shook a few Oxycontin into my mouth. This was no time for Tylenol.

  Claire said, “Nate, go get Mr. Crompton some water.”

  Nathan pattered through the house and returned with a glass of water. I got the Oxy down and rolled back onto my mattress, too weak to hold myself up.

  Claire said, “Go get a towel and get it wet with cold water.”

  The little man pattered around some more, then followed his sister’s instructions to lay the wet towel over my eyes. He hadn’t wrung out the excess water, but I sighed into the cool dark and let water trickle into my ears.

  “I’m okay,” I whispered. “You don’t need to stay.”

  “Mom said,” Claire insisted.

  Her little brother jostled his way over my feet and settled down against the wall by the window. “Don’t worry, we’ll keep you company, so you don’t get lonely.” He squirmed himself into a more comfortable position by my feet. “So how come you’re a hero?”

  “Nathan, Mr. Crompton has a headache. He doesn’t want to answer questions.”

  “Yes he does. He’s lonely, and we’re his friends. Do you have a gun, Mr. Crompton? Can I see it?”

  “You’re not old enough to look at a gun,” Claire objected.

  “No gun,” I whispered.

  “How come you don’t have one?” Nathan asked.

  “Guns are for soldiers,” I said. “I’m not a soldier anymore.”

  “Mr. Crompton is a hero,” Claire explained. “Heroes don’t use guns.”

  “They don’t?” Nate sounded dubious. “How come?”

  His sister said, “Heroes don’t shoot people. If they have to fight somebody, they fight with good hearts, and if they have to kill somebody, they use a sword or something.”

  “Robin Hood used a bow and arrows,” Nate said.

  “Yes, but he didn’t kill people, only scare them by showing off that he could kill them if he wanted to. Mostly he fought with a good heart by tricking the sheriff.”

  I imagined introducing Mora to Claire, then running for cover.

  Something rustled near my head, and Claire said, “You can just lay there, Mr. Crompton, and I’m going to read Alice in Wonderland.”

  I had found an ancient, rat-eared copy of Lewis Carrol’s stories and poetry stored under the daybed and had been thumbing through it, re-reading the passage about the White Knight. I must have left it on the table under the lamp.

  My mother’s old rocker made its “welcome” noise—something between a creak and a whisper—and Claire said, “You can go to sleep if you want, and we won’t call the ambulance unless you stop breathing or something. It’s okay because Nate can call, and I know CPR.”

  I decided you couldn’t get a fairer deal than that. The Oxy would kick in any minute, and I would be well enough to send the kids home before my mother returned.

  Claire must have read the book before because Nathan requested the “…story about the oysters and the lobsters.”

  So Claire found her place and began to read about the
lobster quadrille, and I drifted into a half dream in which Alistair ate oysters one after another, and all the oysters had faces I recognized, and I looked behind him and saw an endless beach, every inch of sand covered with oyster shells. Then Alistair turned to me and said, “Won’t you join the dance, Henry?”

  I must have continued to breathe because I woke, and Claire was explaining to my mother how she and Nathan had found me huddled on the sidewalk. My mother made a fuss over them and paid them in peanut-butter oatmeal chocolate-chip cookies.

  “Bye, Mr. Crompton,” Nate chirped almost in my ear. “Maybe we can come over, and Claire can read some more.”

  “Mr. Crompton doesn’t want us to hang around and bother him,” Claire said.

  “We’re not bothering him. We helped him.” The front door cut off the argument.

  My mother sat on the edge of the daybed beside me. “Claire says you took some pills. Is your head better?”

  “Better,” I whispered. The pain had receded to a dull throb in my eye, and the bayonet no longer seemed to go all the way through my skull and out the back.

  “What happened?” my mother asked.

  I found I could speak above a whisper as long as I kept reasonably still. “He disappeared again last night.”

  She let out a long breath.

  “At the place where he disappeared, I thought I saw something.”

  I paused, but she said nothing.

  “Today, I started seeing them in daylight. Alistair’s doors. Everywhere.”

  “And that’s when the headache started?” she asked.

  I grunted in the affirmative. “My right eye. Right through my head.”

  I waited in darkness, listening to her slow breathing beside me. Finally, she said, “If it weren’t for the way Alistair is behaving, I would think Claire Greene was right and you should see a neurologist.”

  I snatched at the towel over my eyes, but she clapped her hand over it before I could pull it away.