The Blackwood Curse: Queen of Corruption

by Melissa McCann

  “Oh.” Mora stumbled back and up a step at the sight of me, then refused to meet my eyes until she had steadied the pile of loose books in her arms. “Thank you,” she mumbled at my feet. She snatched at her laptop and tote, but I slung them over my own shoulder, forgetting my desire to avoid company. Somehow, little Mora Fee the math-nerd fell into a class of her own, a world of one.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  She blinked rapidly. “The bus”

  I limped backward down the stairs, and she cocked her head as if she couldn’t understand what I was doing. When I had descended three steps, she followed, her eyes on her computer.

  “Do you usually use the Woodhill library instead of the one downtown?” I asked.

  “Oh.” She looked up from the computer I carried on its strap over my shoulder and blinked grey-green eyes. “Primarily for their poly-morphic math treatises, and I found a translation of the Lemurian tetranomial conversion formula and its pre-Cimmarian counterparts. If the translation is accurate, it could resolve the current barrier to the application of the tetranomial conversions to my diffusion algorithm.”

  That all sounded dangerously mathematical. “Are you taking a class?”

  “My doctoral dissertation.”

  She trailed a step behind me, juggling the half-dozen volumes in her slender arms. A swath of hair had come loose from her comb device, and she twitched her head to throw it back from her face. I would have liked to push it behind her ear for her, but she would probably fall off the curb from the shock.

  “What’s it about?” I understood that a dissertation was the final step to acquiring a Ph.D., but Mora could only be twenty-three to my twenty-six.

  She said, “Application of a specialized diffusion algorithm to the mapping of super-complex chaotic systems.”

  “How can you map a chaotic system?”

  She caught up and fell into step beside me. “The term Chaos is applied to a system so complex its order is beyond our current ability to analyze. Its mapping, therefore, requires merely a sufficiently complex process to account for all relevant inputs.”

  She shifted her books to one arm, tucked her hair behind her ear and made a surreptitious grab for the shoulder strap of the computer. I twitched it out of reach and switched it to my other side where she would have to circle all the way around me to get it. “What super systems do you use your algebra thingy for?” I asked, hoping to distract her from her computer.

  “Algorithm,” she said. “I have not yet determined a satisfactory application. It could be employed to map the distribution of dark matter or to predict the migration of unreal particles.”

  “Is that seasonal, or is it more like lemmings?”

  “It’s extremely rapid,” she said.

  “Is that why they're so hard to map?”

  She eyed me askance. “They're hard to map because they aren't real.”

  “I never looked at it that way,” I said humbly.

  She stopped short. “You’re making a joke,” she said as if I had scratched myself in public.

  “A little bit.”

  She scowled. “It's a funny joke.”

  “Do you think so?”

  She lurched into motion again. “It references the dissonance between the existence of unreal particles and their unreal nature.”

  “Would it be funnier if you didn’t analyze what made it funny?”

  She frowned. “I don’t see why.”

  “Are you sure you aren’t doing it backward? If you don’t know what you’re measuring, how do you come up with a process to measure it?”

  She hunched her cheek toward one shoulder and said something indiscernible.

  “What?”

  She raised her voice. “I dreamed it.”

  “Dreamed what?”

  “The algorithm. I dreamed it. I didn’t dream an application, just the math.”

  I found something charming in the idea that Mora Fee dreamed in math. “So you decided to use it for your dissertation?”

  “I was only thirteen,” she said. “I didn’t yet have a sufficiently sophisticated understanding of quantum mathematics to begin to develop the algorithm itself.”

  “You took time away from that to teach me geometry?”

  Color flooded her cheeks. “You said you needed me to tutor you.”

  “I might have over-estimated my importance,” I said. “Relative to a super-chaos algorithm.”

  “I felt the interruption would be insufficient to produce a significant delay in development,” she said. “Additionally, I found your idiosyncratic logical process with regard to geometry to provide marked insights. Your process incorporates phenomenological inputs outside the framework of neurotypical spacial awareness, which, in addition, contributed significantly to your athletic prowess.”

  Much of that had run over my head. “What about your other classes? You must have had other classes.”

  “Oh yes.” Her head came back up. “Mum is a pre-Sumerian anthropologist, and Dad is a paleo-zoologist. They believe a broad spectrum of knowledge is beneficial to any kind of systematic or critical thinking. I studied psycho-neurology, chemistry and bio-chemistry, linguistics, physics and astrophysics, particularly where applicable to mathematics.”

  “What about fiction?” I asked.

  She blinked. “What about it?”

  “Really? Not even as a child? No Winnie-the-Pooh? No Alice in Wonderland? Wizard of Oz?”

  “I don't think so,” she said doubtfully, as if she might accidentally have read The Wizard of Oz when she wasn’t looking.

  “You'd like Alice in Wonderland,” I remarked.

  “I would?” By her expression, I might have suggested she would like to be painted blue.

  “The writer was a mathematician and a logician.”

  I let her scowl to herself in silence for a while as I threw glances at her. While she had grown into her features, she wasn’t beautiful. Neither was she pretty or plain. Beauty seemed to be the wrong scale by which to measure her. A bump interrupted the line of her long nose. Her face would be a pleasant oval if she gained a little weight, and her jaw was a shade too square. I wanted to watch her, waiting for each expression and trying to put her into categories where she simply didn’t fit.

  She had a long slender neck and limbs that combined underlying grace of movement with jerky, exaggerated gestures as if she were acting on a stage and trying to convey sense and emotion to the furthest seats in the balcony.

  I wondered how many boyfriends had noticed her awkward charm and what they had done about it, and I wondered if I should stay away from her. She had seemed almost inconceivably innocent in high school, too innocent to seduce. I felt ragged and dusty and war-stained. At least I was no longer behind that one-way mirror. I had stepped through into the real Woodhill when Mora appeared on the library steps. She was such a strange creature she could walk alongside any oddity and make it momentarily real.

  We had almost reached the boundary of Woodhill when Mora emerged from her internal study to announce, “There is a superficial contradiction in the exhibitionistic and physical nature of athletic competition and the introspective quality of literature. However, the apparent contradiction is illusory, as both are expressions of hyper-efficient pre-conscious environmental processing in disparate areas.”

  If I had been trying to imagine what she was thinking about, this would not have been it. “What does Alice have to do with pre-conscious processing of disparate data?”

  She jumped as if she had forgotten I was there. “I was attempting to reconcile superior competence in the widely divergent areas of literary analysis and physical athleticism in the context of your susceptibility to multi-dimensional phenomenological input.”

  It was practically a conversation, even if I couldn’t entirely follow it.

  We had come to the bus stop outside Woodhill. Mora reached for her laptop and bag.

  I backed off. “Let me carry these all the way for you.” />
  She blushed. “That is not necessary.”

  “It is. You have too much to carry by yourself.”

  The bus wheezed up beside us and settled like a camel, lowering its step toward the curb.

  “The bus stops a block from the University.”

  “Then it’s easy for me to help you.”

  She shook her head and actually backed away a step, and I felt like a middle-school bully playing keep-away with a fourth-grader’s lunch box.

  I handed them over. She almost dropped the books in her arms, caught them in time, got the laptop over her shoulder while dropping the tote bag, then juggled the books and the tote all while backing toward the curb. When she finally had her balance, she turned and followed the line of trudging passengers into the open mouth of the bus.

  The bus closed its doors, heaved itself to its feet, and rolled away from the curb, blowing hot exhaust in its wake. I watched to see if Mora would look back, but the light striking the window turned it into a mirror, and I couldn’t see her at all.

  I wondered if she had some other good Samaritan waiting for her. I imagined a skinny graduate student with enormous teeth and knobby elbows that wore holes in his sleeves—Tenniel's Mad Hatter to her Gothic Alice.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I looked for Mora at the library the next day, and the day after that, but she'd either found all the books she needed, or I had frightened her away and she would never return.

  My daylight walks were pressed on me by my mother. I preferred, however, to walk in the evening after sunset. After dark, the mirror reversed, and I came out from behind the glass. At night, my scarred face no longer set me apart from the human race, and every sound and smell and shiver of wind pricked my senses as if I were some kind of enchanted beast that turned to stone in daylight and became flesh again when the sun set.

  On one of those nighttime shambles, I passed Blackwood House and saw the hint of a light from a second floor window around the side of the house. Alistair usually sat up long past midnight. When I still lived in Blackwood House, I had often sneaked up to his room after my mother was asleep. We had pulled the covers over our heads to keep out the bogymen, and Alistair had whispered dreadful stories to me until we fell asleep.

  With some idea of tossing a pebble at my friend's window and coming up, I circled around the side of the house. As I passed the side door off the kitchen, I heard the click of a latch. I recoiled into the shadows, convinced Verna Blackwood had seen me trespass and come to send me off. Instead, a slight figure shut the door and crossed the yard, the skirts of a long coat flapping at its legs. An early half-moon had risen, its blind, idiot face already casting a glare over the street and bleaching colors to strange cold shades. In its light, I recognized Alistair by the stoop of the narrow shoulders, but even then, I couldn't reconcile his appearance with the fact that he never set foot outside Blackwood House. In my confusion, I didn't think to call out to him until he passed through the gate at the back of the yard.

  I caught the gate a moment before the latch clicked home and slipped through, prepared to call his name. The words withered in my throat when I saw him scuttle into a patch of bleak moonlight, crouching and glancing over his shoulder. I recoiled into shadow. With my nerves unstrung by his uncharacteristic behavior, I found I couldn't raise my voice, as if by drawing his attention, I would be exposing my position to an enemy.

  Alistair consulted something in his hand, a book, which he held up in the light to study its pages in the moon glare. A less romantic person might have brought a flashlight, but nothing so prosaic would satisfy Alistair. If he couldn’t contrive an old-fashioned black lantern, then moonlight would have to do. When satisfied with whatever he read, he went on, scanning to the left and right and studying the ground like a man who has lost his way and hopes to find a track.

  As I couldn't bring myself to cal out to him, I contemplated leaving him to his business, but I found I couldn’t do that either. I waited until he turned the corner onto Fir, then I crossed the patch of moonlight. I reached Fir Street as Alistair passed through the spill of a street light almost at the corner of Alder. Keeping to the shadows, I pursued him on a wandering route through the neighborhood.

  Woodhill grew grim around us. Trees bent crooked arms, and leafy hands gathered shadows around their trunks. Tottered fences and overgrown hedges suggested things that crept and slithered under leaf mold, and shadows seemed to shift and shudder with nothing to move them.

  Alistair raised his book at intervals to study the pages as a man studies a map before returning to peering at the pavement and the shrubbery and occasionally glancing up at the moon with slitted eyes. I wondered if he was out hunting for his old gods. If he hoped to find them under the rhododendrons, they must be pretty unimposing little fellows—rather like the White Rabbit that lured Alice into Wonderland. I swallowed a laugh at the image which came into my head of little Samoth tucked away in his pit beneath a rosebush muttering, "Oh my ears and whiskers."

  Alistair circled and quartered and spied for most of an hour, and we had gone only four or five blocks, as the raven flies, from Blackwood House when my eccentric friend suddenly straightened.

  I drew into the shadow of a flowering hydrangea nearly the size of a small tree, concealed on the other side by a half-rotted picket fence, scabrous with peeling paint. Alistair, odd and childlike in an old brown polyester suit of his father's, stopped in the street about a yard from the sidewalk. He studied the pavement and looked up at the moon. He inched two small steps to his left, cocked his head and consulted his book once more. Then he raised his chin and, squaring his shoulders, took two steps forward, and there in the middle of the street, he turned a corner in mid-air and disappeared.

  I blinked. His disappearance was so unexpected, so impossible, I couldn't wrench my mind around it. When I finally made myself understand that he no longer occupied any part of the street, I stumbled to the place I had last seen him. There, I passed my hands through the air like a blind man, hoping my eyes had somehow mistaken the facts. I felt only air.

  I realized I had exposed myself and felt enemy rifles aimed at my back. I ducked back into cover behind the hydrangea, whose flowering globes reflected a weird electric blue from a nearby porch light, and only then did I think how ridiculous the move had been. As if there were snipers in harmless, graceful old Woodhill.

  Shaken and bewildered, I puzzled through the problem. Either Alistair had disappeared into thin air, or I had suffered some kind of psychotic episode. The latter seemed most likely. Shell shock had finally got the better of me, and I had blacked out while Alistair simply walked away. I might even have hallucinated the whole episode from beginning to end, following a figment of my imagination and unconsciously incorporating Alistair's fiction into my delusion.

  I set that rational conclusion aside and reluctantly addressed the alternative. Alistair had talked about strange universes and the monstrous things that inhabited them. He had intimated that one could reach those gods or demons or monsters where they resided, that he could, in fact, do so himself. I had, quite reasonably, dismissed this as fantasy.

  No, I had to reject it entirely. Perhaps I wasn't altogether in my right mind, but I wasn’t mad enough to believe my friend could pop in and out of universes. Demon gods didn't live in pits in alternate worlds to be found by errant sorcerers wearing ill-fitting brown polyester suits.

  The moon's maddened face crossed the sky, and Alistair didn’t return. I gave up my surveillance when my watch said three-o-clock. Wherever Alistair had gone, if he had ever left Blackwood House at all, he had either gone home by another route, or he must look after himself.

  I let myself into my mother's apartment expecting her to be long asleep, so I jumped half out of my shoes when she barked, "Henry Lance Crompton, I was about to start calling the hospitals to find out what had happened to you." I turned on the light in time to receive a thump on my sternum from the heel of my mother's hand—an expression of profound emotion
on her part. She stood before me, wearing a quilted robe and an outraged expression.

  "Mother, I was in the Special Forces. I can take care of myself in Woodhill."

  She seemed to expand like an outraged cat. "Really! I suppose that's why you've been in the hospital for the last eight months. How did I know you hadn't had a relapse and collapsed in a gutter somewhere?"

  "I don't think you can have relapses from burns," I said. Unwisely.

  She folded her arms and glowered. "I've been scared to death the last eight months, and that's not even counting the years before that when I didn't know what was happening to you over there in the middle of nowhere."

  I repressed a desire to laugh at her treating me like a naughty boy. "I should have called," I admitted.

  She huffed. "You ought to have some kind of excuse, and if it's not a good one..."

  I sat on my bed under the window to take off my boots while I gave her an account of Alistair's peculiar behavior. When I came to the point of Alistair's disappearance, her brows pulled down, and she looked away to stare at the window curtain.

  "So," I said when I had finished, "Either I left my sanity in Iraq, or Alistair has become a stage magician in my absence. Which is it?"

  She sat silent for a moment. Then she clicked her tongue and looked back to my face. "The army can't have trained you very well if poor little Alistair Blackwood was able to give you the slip."

  My mother's explanation now struck me as the most reasonable one. Alistair had gone out in the night playing some child's game. Then he had jigged left when I had been looking right, and I had panicked in a bout of latent battle fatigue. I laughed with relief. "I ought to write a letter to the Pentagon and tell them they aren't getting their money's worth."

  My mother made sure I stretched out on the daybed and pulled the covers over myself before she grumbled off to bed and left me to dream that I huddled, frozen, on a spiral stairway, listening to something far below me seethe and coil and clitter like a snakepit full of beetles. Alistair had stepped around the corner, and I didn't know how to get home.