The Blackwood Curse: Queen of Corruption

by Melissa McCann

  I explained my predicament and requested her tutoring services.

  She resisted, raising objections which I turned aside with either logic or charm as the argument required. I turned out to be more persistent than Mora was reluctant, and I began meeting her twice a week at the back of the library. Mora invariably gave the impression she would bolt if I got too close, but she taught me geometry, making meaningless angles and lines and curves seem perfectly obvious and logical.

  My mouth relaxed into a one-sided smile. “How do you get fields and micro-cues out of teaching me geometry?”

  Her brows pulled delicately down. “Your difficulty was that the angles presented in the textbook offered insufficient data for your intuitive processing faculty. Without your accustomed phenomenological field, you were unable to rationalize the two-dimensional angles. I merely compensated for the missing data, enabling you to process the information in your accustomed fashion.”

  “I don’t remember you saying any of that at the time.”

  She blushed violently and dropped her eyes to the ground at her feet. “I did not believe the information would be of practical use in the circumstances.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  She jumped and sidled as if she had stepped on a snake. “For what?”

  “I got you to tutor me all semester, and I don’t think I ever thanked you. I never even introduced you to my friends or asked you out.”

  She stopped short. “On a date?” She stared as if I was raving like a March hare. “A social engagement with you would not have been comparable to an entire semester of tutoring.”

  Clearly, I had overestimated my adolescent charm. As Woodhill’s golden boy, I had assumed my company and some empty flirtation would be generous repayment for the little math-nerd’s help. I cringed now, remembering the easy arrogance that Iraq had knocked out of me. I had a mental picture of myself as Mora must see me, the spoiled athlete, king of the social circle now scarred and broken and stained to the bone with other men’s blood.

  The bus had wheezed up to the curb while we stood on the sidewalk, and Mora held out her hand for the bag I carried.

  I kept a grip on the strap. “I’ll go with you and carry it the rest of the way.”

  She tipped her chin up. “I don’t need help.”

  I remembered that about her, too. She kept people at a distance. I had once moved my chair too close to hers, and she had gotten up and moved to put a chair between us, with no sign of realizing she had done it. I surrendered the bag. She struggled up the steps of the bus and fumbled to balance bags and laptop and bus pass on her way to a seat. I itched to go after her and take some of her ridiculous baggage, but she didn’t want a bloodstained soldier or a broken-down high-school hero to do her any favors.

  I backed away from the bus stop, turned, and limped toward home. At least my first encounter with my former classmates had been with the solitary, unpopular math-nerd and not one of my own circle.

  I threw my battered scones into a dumpster.

  Halfway home, the ache in my hip passed from discomfort into grinding pain, so when I reached Blackwood House I took the opportunity to stop for a rest. Even when he wasn’t in a storytelling mood, Alistair created around him a sense of performing in a stage play, and I badly wanted to be swept out of my own crumbled life for a while.

  I found him in the dingy morning room where the wallpaper had frayed and the woodwork had lost its polished gleam since I had lived here as the housekeeper’s son.

  Alistair, pale and bleary in his red velvet robe, scowled at me over a triangle of dry toast. "I told you to come at three."

  His performance restored my sense of humor. Ordinary reality had no foothold on Alistair’s world. "If I'm too early, I can go away."

  I’d called his bluff. Alistair flung his toast down on the tablecloth where the crumbs would lie untouched until my mother returned on her next cleaning day. "I had no appetite anyway. Mama,” he shouted in the general direction of the kitchen. “Bring my coffee up to my room.” To me, he said, "We will be able to converse in there without her spying."

  Alistair’s bed/sitting room had faded with the rest of the house. Light from the window had bleached the red velvet wingback chairs to dirty pink. Oriental rugs covered parts of the scuffed oak floors, the rugs themselves worn to the weft in places. Frayed hems hung from the red and gold brocade curtains pulled back from his canopy bed, and the shelves of his bookcases sagged with age.

  I slouched into one of the chairs flanking a small table by the window. "The dark hints you gave me last night have weighed on me until I'm nearly in a frenzy to learn your meaning."

  Alistair flung himself down in the other chair. Throwing his head back, he pressed the back of his wrist to his eyes. “I might almost think you were prescient, or maybe some latent telepathy has been stirred to life by our connection as of old."

  I entered into his performance. "What!" I exclaimed. "Have I been reading your mind all unaware? Tell me what has excited your nerves, and maybe we'll both be the easier for it."

  Alistair dropped his arm and gazed dolefully out the window. "Will we?" he asked in an undertone as though speaking to himself. "I wonder...”

  He had fallen into his storytelling persona, landing somewhere between Doyle and Poe. I assumed my role as Watson to his macabre Holmes. "I think when I left, you were developing an interest in archeology, especially the ancient Egyptian and Aztec civilizations."

  Alistair waved his hand impatiently, "I have since delved into mysteries which our modern scientists and physicists and indeed meta-physicists haven't yet begun to grasp."

  Mrs. Blackwood interrupted us with the arrival of the coffee service. She said nothing to either one of us, and Alistair stared out the window as if the tray had opened the door and walked across the room under its own power.

  I acknowledged her with a nod, avoiding her flat stare and keeping my expression as neutral as I could make it. When she had left us alone again. Alistair, muttering darkly to himself about murder and treachery, filled one cup to which he added four heaping spoons of sugar. He didn't offer to serve me, so I helped myself.

  Alistair's thin hands trembled as he brought his cup to his lips.

  "Your health hasn't improved in my absence," I said.

  "How can it improve so long as I'm under the same roof as She?" He imbued the final pronoun with a dread all out of proportion to his mother's stature.

  As part of his personal fiction, Alistair insisted that his mother had first poisoned his father and was now systematically poisoning him. Why it amused him, I couldn’t imagine, but there was no point in trying to rob him of his little pleasures.

  “There must be some way for you to avoid the poison.”

  He snorted. “How, pray tell me? Why, for all I know, she has placed the fatal potion in the very coffee I drink.”

  He said this just as I took a sip from my own cup. Then I had to suppress a smile at my susceptibility. The moment he made the suggestion, it occurred to me that the coffee had a bitter herbal flavor not quite like any coffee I had ever tasted. "You could get out from under the same roof. Isn't the interest from your trust enough to rent an apartment?"

  Alistair shuddered. "How easy it all seems to you. How you must laugh at my pitiful condition which obliges me to envy that brute strength of yours which I can never share."

  I suppressed a pinch of irritation. It was, in its way, a fair complaint. I had never fully understood the limitations placed on Alistair by his poor health. Now that we rowed in the same boat, I realized that, much as I enjoyed his company for his otherworldly aura, I had been unconsciously impatient with his weakness.

  I said, "At least find some way to avoid the poison. I could climb up the maple tree and pass sandwiches through your window." I immediately regretted the suggestion, even as a jest. As a child, I had often used the tree and window for clandestine meetings, which had tickled Alistair’s facile imagination. I wondered how I would manage it no
w with my bad hip and weak arm.

  Alistair didn’t put me to the test. "I am delighted you can receive some entertainment from my peril, but if I may be serious, let me point out that Mama would never allow me to have contraband of that sort here in my room.”

  He made such a melodrama about her, I couldn't understand why he clung to her so fiercely. "Then you'll just have to eat everything at one sitting."

  He regarded me as if I had suggested he should attempt to eat a live pig. "Even supposing I could bolt an entire day's meals at once–and my fragile digestion would never survive the insult—there are my allergies. A single drop of cream from that pitcher there would be the death of me."

  I half-thought Verna Blackwood objected to me because I came between her and complete domination of Alistair. If so, she had nothing to fear.

  "Never mind, then," I said, returning to the fantastic style he preferred. "Tell me about your adventures. You have tantalized me with such hints, I can no longer restrain my anticipation."

  Mollified, Alistair resumed his story. "You have mentioned those studies which absorbed me at the time you left. I had just begun to uncover among the rituals and sacrifices of those ancient civilizations of Egypt and the Americas certain hints regarding other, more secret rites which interested me very much."

  I stretched my legs in front of me and sank in my chair, prepared for a trip through one of Alistair’s weird imaginings. He had been an older brother to me when I lived in this house, a real-life wizard immured in a lonely tower, making up stories to salve his friendless existence. In his world, enchanted woods and far-away kingdoms were shadows flickering on the wall of a cave while outside lay a cosmos so vast and unknowable that to catch more than a glimpse of it would strip the mind of sanity and leave it screaming naked in the void.

  I said, "I remember you were interested in those sacrificial rites in which the victim's hearts were cut from their living bodies and thrown, still beating, onto the altar fires."

  He gloated a bit with heavy-lidded eyes. "To satisfy the demands of their fanciful nature gods. But those were public rituals and doubtless had no more power to affect the natural world than if the priests had thrown their hats into the air. What I found was a reference to certain entities which the writer believed had once been worshiped by the predecessors of those ancient societies of which I was then learning." He set his coffee aside and steepled his fingers, crossing his legs and leaning back in his chair like a character in an Edwardian fiction.

  “It was the first clue to a quest which would be the labor of years to complete. Have you never heard of the old gods?"

  "Certainly people worshiped pagan deities before adopting the belief in one true god."

  "One true god indeed. An upstart. A newcomer. A mere trifle." Alistair snorted. "The Christian god is a little hedgerow boojum beside the ancient gods that were here in the earth before mankind was ever a dream in the brain of Cthulhu. Jehovah," he repeated contemptuously.

  "I thought you were purely an atheist,” I said. His fantasies had always featured monsters and horrors. I had never heard him talk about gods.

  He flicked his hand. "Let the Christian and the Jew and the Muslim each say, 'My god is the one god,' and there is no one who can prove the facts of the case, but if one man said to another, 'My God is Samoth,' one need only go and stand by the pit of Samoth to see that he exists. Therefore, yes; I'm as much an atheist as anybody."

  I suspected I wouldn't be inclined to worship something called Samoth, which lived in a pit. "If these creatures are real, then how do we know nothing about them?"

  "They are gone, shut inside their temples and those temples closed and their palaces sealed before the rise of mammals or even reptiles. One has only to know where and how to look, and their prison may be found and breached and the gods awakened. Or one god."

  "What? This Samoth creature? Are you planning an expedition to go and wake him up?"

  "Not Samoth," he snapped. "I am tired, and my head aches. I don't think you have taken me seriously."

  He liked to end his tales like Scheherazade, stopping mid-story and leaving the rest for another time. He would tell me more when he felt the suspense had tantalized me long enough.

  I was glad to get home to my mother's house. I too had developed a headache which I thought was probably caused by too much sun in my damaged eye.

  CHAPTER THREE

  I saw Alistair almost daily for a few weeks and pressed him to tell me more about his gods, teasing his storyteller’s ego while he taunted me with suspense. It both pained and relieved me to revive something of the relationship we once had. The memory of my smaller self, the ersatz younger brother in Alistair’s long and mysterious shadow, eclipsed later triumphs on the football field, and his tales of dread and wonder loosened the weight of some of the wet red memories I had carried home from Iraq. Under his influence, I went from child to grotesque without the intervening golden years, and returned to the child again as if I were going back to the past to rebuild myself in my own deformed image.

  His fictions had evolved in my absence. The adventures of his protagonists still defied reality, but now they retained a shadow of scientific plausibility. They took place now on Earth and featured alchemists and astrologers, homunculi and monstrous re-animations of the dead that would raise the hair on the head of Dr. Frankenstein.

  I tried to reciprocate with halting stories about my time in the army, but Alistair had no interest. I think my worldly adventures bored and annoyed him. I was relieved. Nothing I told him could convey the truth, and I lacked his ability to turn reality to fiction.

  When not with Alistair, I would have preferred to stay indoors, at least in daylight, but the doctors had prescribed exercise and rest in equal measure, and my mother, slave to their orders, drove me out of the apartment every afternoon with instructions not to return for at least three-quarters of an hour.

  Those perambulations were an ordeal in surreality. In my childhood, Woodhill had brooded over her children with warm breast and bright wings. She did still, but I was no longer under her wing. I lived behind glass, observer behind a one-way mirror.

  I encountered people I had known all my life. Old gentlemen out taking the air stopped to shake my crabbed hand. They thanked me for my service to my country, and I said the right things and remembered all their names and felt all the while like a ventriloquist’s dummy—wooden, empty-headed, my words coming from someone else’s mouth.

  I had been home some three weeks the day I looked out my mother’s window and saw a child on the sidewalk in front of the house. The stick-limbed little goblin boy had planted his feet at the front gate and now stared at the door like a hungry cat.

  My mother found me standing well back in the living room where the shadows and the thin muslin curtain hid me from the child’s view. She followed my gaze to the window and the street outside. “Oh for goodness’ sake, Henry,” she said. “That’s little Nathan Greene, and he obviously wants to meet you. Go out there and talk to him. Then as long as you’re out, you can take your walk.”

  “Leave him alone,” I said.

  “I expect his sister Claire will be along any moment. They’re nice, well-brought up children, born and bred in Woodhill.”

  As far as I was concerned, that was all the more reason they shouldn’t be exposed to me.

  She steered me toward the door, yanked it open and handed me my cane.

  A sturdy, fresh-faced blond of about thirteen had joined the boy, and the opening door made her squeak and pull harder at her brother’s arm. “Come on, Nathan. You're so embarrassing.”

  But the boy’s big eyes went wider when I came out, and he leaned against his sister’s pull. I gripped my cane and limped down the steps.

  The girl said, “Now look what you've done. You're such a retard.”

  “Can I help you?” I growled.

  The girl's face turned red from the neck of her tee-shirt to the line of her fair hair. “I'm sorry, Mr. Crompton. My l
ittle brother's so stupid.”

  The boy stared up at my ruined face, eyes and mouth wide open. “My dad says you're a hero.”

  “Oh jeez.” The girl moaned in the grip of adolescent humiliation. “He's crazy about heroes. Come on.”

  “Claire thinks I'm making you mad, but I'm not, am I,” he said with imperturbable confidence.

  I wanted to tell them both to leave me alone, but I felt my mother’s eyes on the back of my head. “Did you ever read To Kill a Mockingbird?” I asked, feeling at that moment, very much as I imagined the reclusive “Boo” Radley must have felt, knowing himself to be the object of horrified juvenile fascination.

  The boy shook his head, but his sister said, “I have. I'm gonna tell Mom you were bugging Mr. Crompton, and you're gonna get grounded for life.”

  The threat finally broke the seal between the kid's sneakers and the pavement, and he staggered away with one arm in his sister's grip.

  I considered returning indoors, but my mother’s instructions had included taking my daily walk. I had established a handful of routes which avoided the busier streets. I could often walk for an hour at a time without meeting anyone face to face.

  The particular route I chose that day took me by the Woodhill library. Its grounds occupied half a block on the east side of the neighborhood. The peculiar old building had too few windows for its flat, unadorned face, which gave the effect of a blank stare, and its corners had never seemed quite right, though I had never been able to determine exactly why. Alistair liked to remind me that the Blackwood family had donated volumes of rare books and papers over the last century and even little bits of art and artifact that made the library almost a museum.

  Passing the narrow stone steps that led up to the equally narrow front door, I spied at the top a coltish figure and a tangle of black hair. I recognized Mora Fee by the sliding bags and books before I saw her face. I got up the steps in time to catch the bag and laptop before they fell off her shoulder.