The Blackwood Curse: Queen of Corruption

by Melissa McCann

  “You are not making me feel better.”

  “How did Alistair acquire information concerning the entities in question?”

  I shrugged. “What I said. Books about prehistoric civilizations that were supposed to be here before the ice age.”

  “I don’t know enough prehistory to judge the validity of those sources. Mum might be aware of mythology concerning the hypothetical entities in question.”

  “Your mother?”

  “I told you, Mum studies pre-Sumerian civilizations. Lemuria and Atlantis predated Sumer and Mesopotamia by roughly seven-thousand years.”

  “I missed that in world history,” I said.

  “If Alistair has contrived a way to negotiate the interstices,” she said, “…one has to give credence to the possible existence of his para-dimensional alien entities.”

  I rubbed my forehead. “You’re supposed to be telling me why it’s all impossible.”

  She regarded me like a puzzled kitten. “I don’t know of any other confirmed instance of its being accomplished, but given the mathematical inevitability of multiple universes, translocation between those universes must be theoretically possible. It is unfortunate you failed to obtain video to analyze. As it is, we will have to begin from nearly nothing.”

  “Wait,” I said. “What is we? There is no we. You are not having anything to do with any of it. Even if there was anything to do with. Which there isn’t.” Now I was sounding like her Mad Hatter.

  Her back went stiff. “You are not entitled to interfere.”

  “Interfere with what?”

  “This.” She thrust her little computer at me and shook it as if that would explain everything. “This is what I’ve been trying to do all along. An algorithm to map super-complex chaotic systems.”

  “And that applies to Alistair’s doors and universes…?”

  “Mapping.” She pinned me with a stare as if she could drill her meaning into my brain. “He has information that facilitates navigation of the most complex chaotic system conceivable.”

  I finally made the leap. “Oh no. No. There has to be some other way to test your algorithm. I don’t know exactly what Alistair is doing, but I know it’s not safe. Look what it’s done to me.” I indicated my malfunctioning eye for emphasis.

  Her jaw set. “Even were I able to find another application, this is the most perfect… The most elegant... It would change the way we understand reality.”

  “In a good way?” I asked.

  “Of course in a good way.” Mora stopped for a moment of thought. “Definitely a good way.”

  It might seem to be all innocent math to Mora, but whatever Alistair had become involved in, it wasn’t good, and I couldn’t see how any good could come from it. We didn’t need to map the multi-verse. If Alistair’s story was not, in fact, fiction, then I had to stop him.

  I studied Mora’s face, hoping to see the smallest flicker of indecision or doubt. I didn’t find it. If I refused to bring her to Alistair, she would find her way to Blackwood House on her own.

  I should have kept my problems to myself.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Seeing very little choice, I took Mora off to see the wizard of Blackwood House. The old place crouched on its lot above the sidewalk, and I felt some of the same uneasiness I had experienced the last time I saw it.

  I knocked and didn’t wait for Verna Blackwood, just opened the door and shouted Alistair’s name. When he replied from the general direction of the morning-room, I led Mora inside.

  We found Alistair crouching over his dry toast and coffee with bleary eyes. No wonder; he'd probably been prancing in and out of alien universes all night long.

  He waved his toast in a general invitation to us to sit. “Henry, where have you been? I expected you yesterday.”

  “We quarreled last time I was here,” I reminded him.

  Another flourish of the toast. “You meant to help me in your narrow way.”

  I had been pardoned without notice in one of his quixotic shifts of mood.

  Mora had been a step behind me. Now Alistair saw her. His feverish eyes widened. His lips parted, then, galvanized, he abandoned both toast and chair and advanced on Mora with a flourish of his red dressing gown. “I beg your pardon, Miss. I am Alistair Blackwood.”

  He had her hand in his before she had time to flinch, and he bowed over it like a Victorian gentleman. She recoiled, frowning in surprise at the top of his head.

  I had forgotten to warn Mora about Alistair’s playacting and poses. I cleared my throat. “Miss Fee and I were nearby. I thought we'd drop in and see if you were awake.”

  Alistair straightened, his eyes fixed on her face. “This is the first time Henry has introduced me to anyone remotely interesting. Come into the parlor.”

  Mora tried to tug her fingertips from Alistair's long white clasp, but he had the grip of a python. I inserted myself between them, discretely breaking Alistair’s hold, and steered Mora toward the parlor. “We can't stay long. Mora has a bus to catch.”

  Alistair passed us. “Don’t be ridiculous, Henry. She can’t possibly use public transportation.” He sounded as if I had suggested Mora should eat dinner in a public toilet. “You can call her a taxi. I've used them myself—you have no idea how convenient. Not there, Miss Fee; you’ll be more comfortable on the davenport by me.”

  I maneuvered Mora to a seat at the far end of the overstuffed sofa on which Alistair ensconced himself. I slouched into an uncomfortable wing-back chair across the small room.

  Alistair crossed one knee over the other and rested his arm on the back of the couch. He'd assumed his continental sophisticate persona. “You have to tell me how in the world you ever made the acquaintance of our Henry.”

  “She tutored me in geometry.”

  “Really!” He extended his hand as if to clasp Mora’s but couldn't quite reach and slapped the seat beside him instead. “It must have been a Herculean endeavor.”

  Mora watched him as if he were a rare zoological specimen. “Once I adapted my approach to utilize Hal’s acute receptivity to phenomenological input, he internalized the conceptual framework immediately.”

  “That's not exactly how I remember it,” I said.

  Alistair threw his head back and laughed. “You must possess a remarkable talent for teaching.”

  I said to Mora, “What made you think I had an acute receptivity in the first place?”

  She blushed and dropped her eyes to her lap. “I watched you play football.”

  She had watched me play? I felt a frisson of pleasure at the thought.

  Alistair pouted a little at being excluded from the conversation. “That's right, Henry played football. What did they call you, Henry—the exterminator?”

  Mora’s head snapped up. “While he had no alternate designation in his offensive role as team quarterback, he was often called The Interceptor in his capacity as strong defensive safety because he observed and processed micro-cues in his environment, generating a probability screen with a high predictive value.”

  I assumed she meant that I made a lot of interceptions in those moments of perfect clarity when I knew where the ball would be before the opposing quarterback even took the snap.

  Alistair threw a peevish glance at me as if I were a puppy getting underfoot. “But Miss Fee, why in the world were you watching football in the first place?”

  Her face had stiffened. “Everyone who participated in the instrumental music program was required to attend athletic competitions.”

  I caught a grin forming on the left side of my face. “Why didn't I know you were a band geek?”

  “Music!” Alistair reached out, missed her knee and flattened his hand on the seat beside her. “You must have played something classical; the harp. No, the cello. I see you with a cello.”

  Her mouth tightened. “A cello would be prohibitively cumbersome for deployment in the marching band. I played the trumpet.”

  “The trumpet,” he breathed as if sh
e had said she played the Holy Grail.

  I vaguely remembered a black-haired girl with the marching band. “Not a regular trumpet. You had a tiny silver thing. You did solos.”

  “Piccolo trumpet,” she said.

  “Marvelous,” Alistair cried. “What did you play? Mahler? Wagner?”

  Mora narrowed her eyes ever-so-slightly. “Penny Lane was our signature piece because it featured a piccolo trumpet solo.”

  The name of the song brought back the clack of shoulder pads and the smell of sweat and autumn evenings. “I remember that,” I said. “You really belted it.”

  Alistair said, “I've never had the time to study music. Especially this modern stuff. No real complexity or depth.”

  He was dissatisfied to find the conversation straying too far from himself. To save his ego, I changed the subject. “Mora told me a little about her dissertation, and I thought she'd like to talk with you about those things we discussed. The...what was it, Mora? The subject of your paper?”

  She looked disoriented for a moment. Maybe she too had been caught up in a memory of autumn evenings. She pulled herself together and turned to Alistair. “Application of a specialized diffusion algorithm to the mapping of super-complex chaotic systems.”

  Alistair nodded judiciously.

  I said, “Alistair will have no trouble following you, but maybe you could slow that down for me.”

  She took a deep breath. “My dissertation applies a specialized algorithm to map the diffusion of elements within a chaotic system—for example the interaction of multiple universes within higher-dimensional space.”

  Alistair chuckled. “My dear, you can't mean you think you can...what...move around among those universes using common mathematics.”

  “Highly complex and specialized mathematics. However, I do not believe we possess a technology or a power supply sufficient to translocate from our universe to any other.”

  Alistair made a great production of hiding a secretive smile. “Oh, I don't know. I think a way might be found to...shall we say...slip between them.”

  She arched one brow. “Are you aware of a means of translocation which is not recognized in common scientific circles?”

  He dropped his eyes and pursed his lips in a pantomime of profound modesty, but he could never have resisted the temptation to correct her. “I confess to being called, by some, an authority on the subject, and you are, for the most part, correct. The means of passing from one world into another is beyond the compass of what is called science in this age. As it happens, I possess, if I do say it myself, a notable little library of relevant texts. Quite valuable if I understand correctly.” He made a rueful face and waved a dismissive hand. “I am neither an antiquarian nor a bookseller.”

  Mora said, “I am aware of translations of pre-historic mathematics from the Hyperborean and Atlantian age, but I have not heard of any science concerning trans-universal movement. Anything you could tell me could significantly advance my ability to extrapolate the relationships between our three-dimensional universe and its major co-actors within higher-dimensional space.”

  Alistair pressed his index finger across his lips. “But why trouble yourself with all the—you call them universes rather than worlds or dimensions—why bother with those which can have no practical application?”

  “Because one cannot accurately locate a single target universe without identifying all relevant influences on its movement through higher-dimensional space.”

  Alistair raised his brows. “It hardly seems worth the effort. No doubt I could identify scores of useful worlds in a few hours’ study of my library.”

  Mora’s brows contracted. “I do not understand how one can identify or describe the properties of a given universe without mathematical mapping.”

  “The ancients once knew the secrets of the elder things,” Alister intoned. “They studied the stars and the earth millennia before the dawn of what we now call civilization. They wandered in dreamlands. They worked alchemy and magic, and what they learned by those means, they passed down in strange rituals and incantations to the primitive tribesmen and barbarians who roamed the steppes and plains doing violence to their fellows in the name of brute survival.”

  Alistair had shifted into his storytelling voice, half declaiming, and the room seemed darker, like the caves in which primitive men huddled for protection against the night.

  Mora tilted her head. “How much of that data survives in comprehensible form?”

  “Much.” Alistair sprang up. “Much indeed. Their heirs may have descended into ignorance and darkness, but the spark of their ancient science remained—enough to be rediscovered and reassembled from the fragments of a thousand, thousand rites and half-understood traditions of base and mongrel races. Cults abound wherein dark and decadent men worship the old gods and wait in readiness for their waking and return.”

  Alistair might assign them villainous roles in his fantasies, but he had no real objection to “base and mongrel races.” They added drama to his fantastic world and were thus more agreeable to him than otherwise.

  Mora said, “I am unable to deduce how any of this is applicable to my mapping algorithm.”

  Now Alistair fairly quivered with eagerness to spill every secret he knew or could invent. “Come.” He offered her his arm. “You will understand everything.”

  She merely frowned at the arm he held out to her, and he had to settle for guiding her by sweeping gestures toward the stairs. I limped after them to the second floor and Alistair’s room.

  Alistair took Mora to the bookcase on the wall across from his bed. She scanned the leather-bound spines, then tilted her head to study the stacks of photocopied pages on the third shelf. “This is where you attained your understanding of para-dimensional interactions?”

  He shrugged as if he couldn’t be bothered with that sort of nonsense. “These texts…” He waved a hand to take in the entire collection, “…can, if read by a true student of the cosmos, reveal the secrets of a thousand worlds or more and the routes by which a knowing traveler can reach them.”

  Mora made her puzzled kitten face. “I do not understand how that can be possible without a comprehensive mathematical model.”

  “Mathematics,” Alistair said scornfully, oblivious to the possibility that Mora the mathematician might be offended. “The ancients needed no mathematics. Their science extended into higher realms of understanding. Allow me…”

  He dragged down a handful of books and carried them to the table by the window. I limped out of the way and propped myself against the headboard of Alistair’s bed as I had often done as a child while Alistair manufactured stories out of myth and dream and his own dreadful imagination.

  Alistair spread the books on the table, opened the topmost, and flipped through it with no regard for the age and possible fragility of the tome. “You see?” he said, pointing to a page.

  I couldn’t see from my vantage what the page contained, but Mora squinted and frowned. Her own finger traced the page as she chewed her lip. “The quartz possesses piezoelectric properties, but I do not understand the purpose of the salt.”

  “Their crystalline structures resonate with the engines of the universe—what our ignorant forebears sometimes called, ‘the music of the spheres.’” Alistair flourished his arm to encompass the universe.

  Mora cocked her head. “I believe I see the significance of these lines and that glyph, although I cannot infer their function. May I take a picture?” She showed him her cell phone.

  “Of course,” he said. “You may find this next plate useful as well.” He waited for Mora to snap a shot of the page before flipping his way to another diagram which he displayed for her. “You see here how the elements direct the flow of primordial forces.”

  I got up and looked over their shoulders at the rat-eared book. The ink had faded to a shade of denim while the pages had darkened to yellow-brown around the edges. I tried to read the handwritten text on the facing page. The tight sc
ript jittered as if the writer had a palsy.

  “German?” I asked, making the best guess I could, given the rough shape of the words.

  “Old Frankish,” Mora said. She did something with her phone.

  The drawing on the other page had been made in the same tremulous hand. The nearest comparison would be to a lopsided mandala, the lines and junctions marked with symbols that made no sense to me. Smaller drawings occupied the corners and margins of the page—things that looked like molecular models, little solar-systems and the kind of runes you might expect to find in one of the fantasy games teenage boys played with dice and maps.

  I blinked, and the drawing seemed to shift and lift off the page in three dimensions. It rotated, lines and symbols taking on depth and stretching until they turned a corner that was neither right nor left nor any other angle I could understand.

  I snapped both eyes shut and backed away from the table. The side of Alistair’s bed caught me behind the knees, and I sat, pressing my knuckles to my aching eye.

  Mora and Alistair turned from their book and stared at me.

  “Headache,” I explained. “Having them lately,” I added for Alistair’s benefit.

  Alistair nodded and turned back to his book, but Mora said, “Is it consistent with previous episodes?”

  I grunted in the affirmative.

  She looked from me to the book and back to me. “Would it be preferable to return home?”

  I tried to shake my head, but the movement hurt. “You do what you’re doing. I’ll lie down if you don’t mind, Alistair?”

  “Yes of course.” Alistair dismissed the question, eager to get me out of the way so Mora could concentrate on him. “Come, Miss Fee, you will find this interesting.”

  Mora waited for my nod of reassurance before she turned back to Alistair and his books.

  In a few minutes, the pain subsided into the background ache I had been ignoring for the last two days. Alistair was saying, “Fortunately, that kind of dangerous trial and error is made unnecessary by the dreamers, those minds so highly sensitive as to be able to depart their Earthly plane and pass through many worlds, aided, often, by rare herbs and drugs. These dreamers report of travels in strange and wonderful places, some of which are, perhaps, way-stations or junctions of many worlds, as they are described in such accurate detail by dreamers separated from one another by aeons as well as miles. They spoke with the elder things for whom time is but a dream itself and plumbed wells of wisdom deeper than the universe.”