QUEEN OF CORRUPTION
The Blackwood Curse
Queen of Corruption
MELISSA MCCANN
Copyright © 2017 Melissa McCann
All rights reserved.
DEDICATION
To Doug, who said, “Well, are you going to write it?”
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QUEEN OF CORRUPTION
Contents
Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
PREFACE
This book began as a bit of a game. I’d been spitting and snorting through a really rather terrible “Lovecraft inspired” movie on television. It was, I felt, completely missing the point, the mood, the whole essence of Lovecraft with his passion for the vast, ineffable indifference of the universe. And so on. I was thoroughly disgusted.
Finally, I could stand it no longer. I leaped to my feet, snarling, “That is not how you write a Lovecraft story,” and stomped off to fetch my computer. I sat down and wrote an outline for a “proper Lovecraft story” with the effete, intellectual protagonist who has a weakness for occult books and arcane mysteries, the sturdy friend and associate who narrates the story, the para-dimensional alien god thingummies—the whole enchilada.
Then I stomped into my husband’s office and shook my computer at him. “See? This is how you write a Lovecraft story.”
My husband, not knowing Lovecraft from a hole in the ground, said, “Are you going to write it?”
It was the only logical course. I wound up with a little Lovecraft-type adventure with which I was quite pleased.
However, this first story suggested a second and a third, which would require that the first story be turned from a novella to a full-length novel. The protagonist became the villain, and the sidekick became the hero.
In the process, it went from being a Lovecraft story to being my own. Which is as it should be. The universe, however, remains ineffable. And that too is as it should be.
CHAPTER ONE
My service in Iraq ended in a blaze of something like glory and something like the breath of hell. Now I limped down Blackwood Street toward home with a crippled hip, a cane and scars all down my right side. Healed burns wreathed my right hand, and ropy scars distorted my features and writhed across my cheek.
I had grown up here in the haunted neighborhood of Woodhill on the sloping skirts of Seattle—a golden boy, football hero, apple of my mother’s eye. Too poor to go to college if I’d wanted to, and too much in love with adventure to find a trade, I joined the Army Special Forces. I made a good soldier, strong and well-coordinated, still a golden-boy with a second sense for ambush and for hidden bombs. Until the last one taught me I was mortal after all.
Halfway home, I paused at the feet of a square-faced, three-story house that squatted like a toad beside the street. My childhood friend still lived there, and I wanted to see him before I went home to my mother’s house. The porch stairs creaked under my feet as I climbed them, and half the boards of the porch were leprous with decay. Blackwood House had been painted long before I had lived there, but the black paint hadn’t been freshened since I had been gone. It had peeled and flaked in places, and an ashy rime had bloomed like mold over the weather-worn siding.
As I waited for an answer to my knock, I gave in to irrational terrors and glanced over my shoulder. Maples closed the streets in Gothic arches. Evening tipped down from the east over the unprotected city and poised to coil clammy limbs around the shabby houses, but no rotting, black-burned faces loomed out of the dark to reproach me for the sin of arrogance.
I thought I would have to rap again, but the door opened, and Alistair’s mother stood in the doorway. She had been handsome once. Now the lines of her face sagged, and something sharp and white seemed to press at her skin from the inside.
She took in my scarred cheek, and her lip curled as if she’d smelled rotten meat. “Well?” she said.
I’d never known why she disliked me. I’d simply grown the habit of ignoring her open antipathy. “I’m here to see Alistair, Mrs. Blackwood.”
“Alistair is unwell today.”
Alistair had always been unwell. “I’d like to see him.”
She waited a beat, her eyes flat and cold, but I held my ground, and she stepped back, falling away from the door enough to let me through.
The wallpaper in the foyer had split at the seams. Someone had replaced the bulbs in the antique sconces with fluorescent coils, and the too-white light made the room look dingy and vague as if the house might fade out like a bad cut in a black and white film.
I climbed the stairs, the spindles creaking and wobbling under my weight. At the top, I called Alistair’s name, then hobbled to his bedroom door and knocked.
“Henry?”
Only Alistair and my mother called me Henry. I went by Hal to everyone else.
Something fell inside the room—a chair, I thought—and Alistair flung his door open. He wore his personal uniform, a red velvet robe over silk pajamas.
“Henry.” He grabbed my shoulder and almost pulled me off my feet in his hurry to get me inside.
Alistair had a long, aesthetic face with a pointed chin and high, wide forehead. The bruised circles under his eyes had darkened since I last saw him, and his cheeks had sunk a little.
He seized my right hand, oblivious to its deformity. “You have come just in time. I have many strange and wonderful things to tell you."
An involuntary grin distorted my scarred face into a gargoyle leer. I cocked my head to hide the deformity, but a weight slid off my shoulders as if the years had rolled me back to boyhood. I might be all but unrecognizable from my childhood self, but Alistair had been frozen in time.
He scowled. “What’s wrong with your face?” Alistair didn’t like change. At least he didn’t like change that altered the established narrative of his life.
“I told you in my letter. The bomb.” I turned my head to the other side to give him his first clear look at my ruined features.
His jaw tightened for a moment as he wrestled this new development into his personal fiction, then his forehead smoothed, and he clapped me on the shoulder. “Of course, you must conceal your deformity from the world. How well I understand the common man’s despite of all that is strange and incomprehensible to him.”
I repressed a smile that would have contorted the burned side of my face. No doubt a deformed companion would add color to his fantasy.
“Sit down,” he said. “You have come just in time. I have a great quest in store, and there is everything to tell you if you are to be of service to me. I propose nothing less than the conquest of the world with you by my side as a prince and a general of armies such as this world has ever imagined.”
My spirit rose to the promise of one of Alistair’s otherworldly adventures. He ought to have been a novelist of only he didn’t believe so deeply in his imaginary worlds. "I can't stay now," I told him. "My mother is waiting, but I want to have a long talk and catch up with you tomorrow—or the next day if tomorrow isn't convenient."
His face fell, and he huffed with
impatience. "Yes. Yes, tomorrow. No one knows better than me that mothers must be placated." A scowl covered his face as he said this. I resisted the impulse to laugh while I waited out his brooding pause. Finally, he returned to the real world and seized my injured hand again. "Come tomorrow at three o'clock."
Evening had surrendered to night by the time I stepped out onto the Blackwood porch. Shadows rolled over the quaint old neighborhood. The air smelled of cut grass and a hint of smoke from outdoor barbecues, and the lighted windows of the houses cast a friendly glow on me as I passed. I felt all but human for the first time since waking burned and shattered in the hospital.
My canvas duffel grew heavy on my shoulder before I lurched up the steps in front of my mother's tiny apartment, one of six cubbyholes carved from a two-story Craftsman which had been noticeably smaller than Blackwood House to begin with.
I eased the duffel to the step, and my mood sank again. Before I could put my knuckles to the door, it opened, and my mother stood in the doorway, an unconscious reflection of Verna Blackwood, one hand on the door frame, the other planted on her hip. My mother showed every minute of her forty-three years, but she was as beautiful now as she had been to my boyish eyes. She had an oval face and kind mouth, and she’d kept her hair the same chocolate brown I remembered. At the moment, her narrowed eyes gave me a shudder of childish guilt. Her foot tapped on the floor. "Henry Lance Crompton, I've been expecting you all day. What in the world have you been doing?"
I might as well have been ten years old and coming home long after my bedtime.
Then she seized me in her arms, hugging me as if I weren’t a foot taller than herself. I bent my head for her to kiss me all over my face as she had done when I was an infant. She pressed her cheek to my mutilated one. Finally, when she had satisfied herself I was alive and in one piece—more or less—she pushed me back and inspected my face—the eyelid that drooped under a skein of scar tissue, the side of my nose that melted into my cheek, the scars that paralyzed my muscles and pulled my face into a snarl when I tried to smile.
She made a disgruntled noise. “What a mess. Couldn’t those doctors put you back together any better than that?”
She sounded so indignant I had to smile, cocking my head to one side. “It all works.” The army surgeons had saved all my limbs, replaced my ruined hip, pinned together the broken bones and got everything working well enough for me to come home.
“Well,” my mother said, “It’s not so bad as it could be.”
“If you like the Phantom of the Opera.”
She reproached me with a light smack on the cheek—a love-tap, her way of compensating for a mother’s over-fondness. “If anybody stares, you tell them you saved six lives from that bomb, and what have they done lately that's worth getting out of bed for.” She sniffled, then smacked my cheek again. “Anyway, the other side is still pretty. I kept some bread and soup warm for you.”
I dropped my duffel on the little daybed that doubled as a couch in the tiny living room. My mother had been prepared to surrender her single bedroom in the back of the apartment, the one that had been mine before I left home, but I had threatened to sleep on the living room floor if she refused to keep her room.
She made me sit at the table in the kitchen, which left hardly room for the refrigerator door to open behind me or the oven to open on the other side. I ate thick beef stew and fresh bread with butter while my mother tidied the kitchen, keeping half her eye on me as if she feared I would disappear if she looked away.
When she finally consented to stop petting and fussing over me and go to bed, I dressed in long pajamas to cover my scars. Then I laid myself out on the little daybed, my feet almost hanging off the end. I stared into the shadow-pooled ceiling, trying to find myself here in my mother’s home. Woodhill had shaped me in her own image, then driven me out from under her wing, starved for adventure and burning to test myself against the limits of the world.
Well, I’d met my limit.
Before my mother woke the next morning, I went out to stretch my injured leg and fetch my mother some cranberry scones. The Seattle sun could have been an altogether different star from the one that savaged the Persian east. A breeze smoothed my left cheek while my right felt nothing, as if I had only half come home, the rest still lying on a village street outside a burned and blasted mosque.
Conversation died when I entered the cafe on the outskirts of Woodhill, a haven of polished tables and dim corners. Twenty-somethings in groups and professional couples in their thirties seemed to stare over the tops of newspapers and tablets, taking in my deformed face and the hand clenched on my cane.
I froze inside the door in the naked conviction that they knew everything I had done since I left home—the rattle of gunfire, screaming missiles, blood soaking into sand. I looked around for cover and realized I was still in the cafe. I forced myself into motion, conscious of hidden snipers that couldn’t possibly be there.
Baristas milled around as I approached, each trying to avoid being the one to serve me. By the time I reached the counter, a scarecrow of a young man with small round glasses and shaggy hair bobbed to the front of the mob and held his ground at the register, pretending he didn't see my scars as he took my order and counted out my change.
Finally, I could take my paper bag and limp back out into the light, keeping my head down to avoid strange eyes. Because I wasn’t looking, I nearly knocked over a slender woman burdened like a burro with bags and backpacks and the padded case of a laptop computer.
Two of the bags dropped. She said something that sounded like, “Darn it.” Then I dropped my scones to catch her elbow before she toppled, overbalanced by the laptop and backpack.
“My fault,” I said.
I left her poised on her feet and bent to pick up one of her fallen bags. Then, as I handed it back to her, I looked up far enough to see her face.
She squeaked and dropped an oversized tote as she unconsciously accepted the canvas shopping bag I offered. “Oh.” She looked down at the dropped tote bag as if she had no idea where it had come from, and a flush ran up her face.
Mora Fee had changed nearly as much as I had in the years since she had tutored me in high-school geometry. I remembered her as a skinny girl, plain as soda crackers, with blue-black hair and thick bangs cut straight across her forehead. The bangs had gone, and she'd twisted her hair into an untidy knot. Her features, once odd and uneven, had turned striking, stronger than they were pretty, and her figure had gone from skinny to gamine.
I muttered an innocuous greeting as I held out the tote to her, keeping my face averted, hiding scars, avoiding her expression.
She took the bag and looped the strap over her shoulder, fussing with it as though it were as complicated as a parachute. “Hello, Hal,” she mumbled, then cleared her throat and tipped her chin up. “I was aware of your injury and your return. The newspapers reported that you were burned when you saved six men from a bomb.”
I looked away. Three of my unit had been outside the mosque, out of range of the blast. Six had heard my warning and escaped. Three, including the CO and executive officer, had been in front of me, too far into the building to get out in time. I muttered, “Those reporters might as well write fiction.”
“Cognitive dissonance.” She began to edge to one side to get around me. “Excuse me,” she said. “I have to meet my bus.” She escaped in a rush, staggering a little and trying to keep her load from pulling her off balance.
CHAPTER TWO
Nettled, I went after her, pulling the biggest bag off her shoulder and slinging it over mine. “What cognitive dissonance?”
“Oh.” She shied like a skittish colt, which made room on the sidewalk for me on her left. I had forgotten she was so jumpy.
She had the kind of complexion that didn’t tan and showed every change of mood. Now she had gone red again. She hitched in a breath. "You are struggling to reconcile the fact of having saved your own life and those of most of the others in your gr
oup with the deaths of the remaining three. That represents an example of classic survivor’s guilt coupled with the knowledge that if you had detected the incendiary a few moments earlier, the other three would have escaped as well."
My throat tightened. If I had seen it five seconds earlier. Three even.
She inhaled like a hiccough. “You are accustomed to operating within a highly-refined framework of environmental micro-cues in your phenomenal field, which enable you to anticipate probable outcomes in a given situation with a high degree of accuracy.”
“I’m accustomed to what? Where do you get all that from?”
“I tutored you in geometry,” she said, as if it should be obvious to anyone who could add two and two to achieve four.
In my senior year, I'd needed a final math credit. I had already decided on a tour in the Army, and I had to graduate to qualify for Special Forces.
I had never had any trouble getting grades well above average, but geometry utterly defeated me. Angles and relationships that should have been simple slid off my brain like oil on glass, so I sought out Mora—the school math geek.
I found the little math-geek difficult to approach. On my first attempt, she had stared at me as if I were a fox marauding in the henhouse and ducked behind a herd of migratory freshmen. After two more tries in which she disappeared before I came within speaking distance, I trapped her in the back of the library at the furthest study table in the darkest corner. I had a chair out and sat before she knew I was there.
She squeaked and scooted her own chair back, but I had blocked her escape on one side, and she would have to scramble over two chairs on the other to escape. I counted on her sense of dignity to prevent it. “I need some help with math,” I told her.
“What math?” she whispered. She cleared her throat. “What math?” she said a little louder.
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