The Blackwood Curse: Queen of Corruption

by Melissa McCann

  “What does Alistair have to do with it?” I demanded. “I’m hallucinating or growing a brain tumor.” Why did everyone around me seem to think Alistair’s behavior was perfectly reasonable?

  Keeping one hand on the cloth over my eyes, my mother took my hand, the scarred one, and held my twisted fingers. “No, Henry, I don’t suppose you are.”

  “What do you mean you don’t suppose?” I demanded.

  She sighed. “It’s an odd family, that’s all.”

  It occurred to me I might be the only person in Woodhill who was sane. “No family is that odd.”

  “Not very many,” she agreed. “You’d better leave poor Alistair alone.”

  How many did she think there were? “Mother, people can’t pop in and out of the universe.”

  She clicked her tongue. “Well, it certainly wasn’t my idea that they should, but nobody consulted me on the subject. Take off that towel and try to look around again.”

  I exposed my left eye first and took in my mother’s little living-room—a mix of sturdy Craftsman woodwork and unimaginative, textured drywall—un-despoiled by Alistair’s reeling openings in the universe.

  “ Can you see?” she asked.

  “It’s fine.” Then I removed the towel from the other eye, and every corner of my mother’s living-room exploded into corners and angles turning in impossible directions like a mirror maze, and the pain, which had faded to a dull ache, stabbed deep in my skull. I flinched and squeezed my eyes shut.

  My mother pressed the towel over my eyes again. “You were all right at first.”

  I couldn’t speak or move my head for a moment. Finally, I whispered, “Until I opened both eyes.”

  “The trouble is in your right eye?”

  I restrained a nod. “I’m near-sighted on that side. No peripheral vision, but it seems like I can see Alistair’s corners just fine.”

  “That’s a start then. Cover up the one and try the other,” she said as calmly as if she were bandaging a skinned knee.

  “I don’t have to be having a complete breakdown, just blackouts or seizures.” I uncovered my left eye. The room tried to sliver into fragments. I blinked and squinting until I saw only what I knew to be there. I looked around the room, forcing my eye to stay in focus.

  “That looks all right,” my mother said.

  “It’s not too bad.” In a few moments, I felt I had my vision under control, at least on the left side.

  She inhaled a long breath, then jerked her chin in a curt nod. “Well, you can’t go around in an eye-patch.”

  The right eye gave me considerably more trouble than the left, perhaps because I had limited control of it to begin with. Every time I uncovered it, the room unfolded into shuffling angles, every edge of wall or shadow multiplying a thousandfold. I squinted and strained. Still, every time I cracked my lids, my mother’s tiny apartment exploded into mad geometries.

  At last, I lay back on the daybed, sweating, and I still couldn’t see out of my right eye.

  My mother said, “That will have to be enough for now.” She refreshed the water on the towel and laid it over my eyes.

  “Mother, you know what this is, don’t you.”

  She clicked her tongue. “For goodness’ sake, Henry, I’m not an eye doctor.”

  “It’s not about my eyes,” I said. “And if you aren’t afraid it’s a brain tumor, then it has to be about Alistair.”

  “Stay away from poor Alistair, at least until your eyes are better.”

  “What is he doing?”

  “Henry, I don’t have the least idea except that it’s affecting you, and it’s none of your business.”

  She straightened. “Go to sleep, and we’ll try your eyes again in the morning.” Footsteps faded into the hallway until her bedroom door closed.

  I lay on my bed, blind and bewildered. Questions turned to dreams in which I roller-skated hand in hand with Mora through a funhouse maze. The mirrors kept rotating and revolving, creating doors and passages between glass planes, then closing them again. Overhead, the mirror ball reflected strobing anti-light, and all the while, Mora tried to explain a complex geometrical proof I couldn’t understand, although I knew her explanation made it perfectly clear and obvious. I was just too obtuse to see.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I woke with daylight turning the inside of my lids to red. I clapped my hand over my eyes for fear I would forget and open them unprepared. The pain had faded to a dull ache I could ignore, and a double dose of something from over the counter would probably knock it out. I still felt wrung out, but I’d rested enough to face another try at seeing.

  It seemed I had learned enough control of the left eye, at least, to look around my mother’s apartment without seeing every corner unfold into a storm of angles.

  I tried the right eye, concentrating more on keeping it from infecting my left with the view of maddening angles than on suppressing the abnormal perceptions of the right. That, too, came more easily. A night’s rest had improved my control.

  I stayed home that day, working on controlling my sight until I could finally hold off the mad, unlight angles with a little concentration.

  My mother had her work and her church clubs and social occasions throughout the day. When at home, she evaded my questions and finally told me to stop bothering her and retreated to her room.

  I almost stayed home the next day as well. I still struggled with my concentration, but I could focus with less effort now, and I had worried yesterday that Mora would come to the library expecting to meet me. If she didn’t find me there, she might decide I no longer wanted to see her. I’d worked too hard to domesticate her to let her flit off and never come back.

  Near noon, I got up from the daybed and fetched my cane.

  “Henry, are you going out?” My mother came from the kitchen to frown at me.

  “I think I’ve got it under control,” I said.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Just walking.”

  “Why don’t you call the library and ask Lorelei Peterson if she’s there?”

  “If who’s there?”

  Her narrowed eyes told me she knew I knew who she was talking about. “Ask Lorelai if Mora is there, and have her walk here. She can stay for lunch.”

  I’d barely got Mora used to following me back to her bus without flitting off in a panic. “She doesn’t want to eat lunch.”

  “Her mother says she doesn’t eat enough.”

  I couldn’t wrap my head around the idea of my mother consulting Mora’s mother about Mora’s dietary habits.

  “I’m just going for a walk,” I repeated. “I’ll be back in an hour.”

  I stopped on the front stoop and tested my vision. The world tried to unfold, and I clapped my hand over my right eye as much to block the shuffling view as in reaction to the pain that suddenly squeezed my eyeball and made my eye water.

  I eased down the front walk, looking mostly at the sidewalk. By occasionally stopping to cover the eye and concentrate, I managed to prevent the universe from exploding into fragments.

  The risk paid dividends when I found Mora at the foot of the library stairs with her hands clasped around her knees and her laptop computer in its case beside her. She stood when she saw me, sticking her hands in her pockets, then pulling them out again and tucking a strand of loose hair behind her ear.

  When I came near enough to speak, she dropped her hands and raised her pointed chin. “I finished reading,” she announced.

  I tilted my face to hide a smile. “Of course you have.”

  Mora bent to pick up her laptop by its carrying strap, but I reached it first and slung it over my shoulder to hold hostage. She didn’t have any books with her today, and her only other burden was a red tote bag that probably contained enough kit for a two-day forced march through hostile country.

  She fell in beside me, her eyes steady and her face sober. “I believe we should first discuss the significance of the recurring theme of cross-universa
l translocation.”

  I realized for the first time what I had been giving her to read: children’s fiction, and as she said, heavily weighted toward people popping in and out of other worlds. If they hadn’t been such favorites of mine, I would have suspected Alistair was seeping into my unconscious mind. Maybe he had always been there. His own stories had always featured strange places and unnatural worlds. Darker versions of Oz and Narnia.

  I had lost my concentration, and a black-light nebula unfolded from the line of a fence.

  I averted my gaze and concentrated on Mora. “It doesn’t have any particular significance,” I said. “People have always told stories about magic and monsters. Especially to children.”

  “Ah.” She nodded. “The trans-location from one world to another representing the imposition of adulthood on the formerly innocent perceptions of childhood.”

  I might have created a monster.

  “Yes, but did you like the books?”

  She furrowed her brow. “I do not have experience to associate with Oz or Narnia.”

  “We could read something else,” I said, focusing my attention on Mora through the confusion triggered by the roiling mouth of a wormhole opening in the middle of a lawn to my left. “Or you don’t have to read anything at all.”

  She scowled. “In that case, we would have nothing to talk about.”

  Somehow we had wound up walking north on Ash, deeper into Woodhill. The geometry of our relationship had changed when I wasn’t looking, and the shortest distance from the library to her bus no longer seemed to be a straight line.

  “We’d think of something.” I scoured my brain for a shared interest.

  At that moment, the pavement opened up like a puzzle-box almost underfoot, and I jerked to the right, nearly bumping Mora off the curb before I grabbed her elbow.

  She recoiled, breaking my hold and putting distance between us. She blinked several times and gave herself a little shake before her eyes refocused on me. “That is the third time in ten minutes that you have exhibited a pronounced startle reflex without an evident stimulus.”

  “Third?” I’d thought I handled the first two without drawing her attention.

  She took another long breath. “If you are experiencing stress-induced anxiety, there are psychotropic medications that could relieve your symptoms.”

  To recount for Mora the history of my visual difficulties, I would have to explain Alistair’s alleged disappearances and dreadful gods. None of it would fit into the world of math and logic and common sense. On the other hand, of everyone I knew, Mora was the one who would see the impossibility of Alistair’s alleged adventures, and I badly needed a sane mind to bolster my own reason.

  “I’ve been seeing things,” I blurted. “They’re light, but it’s not a light I can see. Look.” I took her arm and turned her, pointing to a wheel of un-light unfolding infinitely in a tangle of lilac branches.

  She frowned at the point I indicated. After a moment, she shook her head. "The most likely explanation is the effect produced by light striking an irregularity in the lens of your right eye, or you may have suffered a previously undetected injury to the optic nerve.”

  I shook my head. “If it’s not really there, then I have to be insane.”

  She frowned. “Why do you believe your visual distortions are material phenomena?”

  I dug my knuckles into my eye again and hardened my resolve. “You have to understand Alistair.”

  She cocked her head. “I do not see the connection.”

  “Alistair Blackwood is my oldest friend,” I said. “My mother was the family housekeeper, and we lived at Blackwood House. We grew up together like brothers. He’s about half an invalid, and he used to entertain me by telling me stories.”

  “Stories like Alice and Dorothy?”

  I stared. “What gave you that idea?”

  She arched her black-wing brows as if it were the most obvious connection in the world. “Those are the stories we have been talking about.”

  “Yes, but they’re children’s stories. Fiction. Fantasy. Alistair thinks he really can hop in and out of other worlds.”

  She tilted her head and narrowed her eyes at me. “Your visual distortions?”

  She should have been explaining why none of this was possible. “Mora, people can’t pop in and out of universes like they’re going around the corner for ice-cream.”

  “Not usually,” she agreed. Her eyes focused on the middle distance where all math seemed to live. “The membranes separating universes within higher-dimensional space preclude the exchange of material particles apart from gravitons…” She inhaled sharply, and her eyes popped wide.

  “Wait,” I protested. “How often is usually?” I was definitely the only sane madman in Woodhill.

  She didn’t appear to hear me. “Given the application of the Lemurian tetranomials to dimensional drift...” She grabbed her laptop bag, pulled it from my shoulder and flopped to the pavement to wrestle with the zipper. “…have to account for gravitational slippage...” She squinted into math-space for a moment. “The Hawking theory?”

  Realization dawned that I had thrown a cat in the canary cage, and I wasn’t sure whether Mora was cat or canary. "Don’t even think about trying it."

  She froze with her computer still unopened on her lap. “How does he map the dimensional drift?”

  “The dimensional what?”

  She looked half dazed. “How does he know where to find the interstices…the weak points which allow matter to pass from one universe to another?”

  I couldn’t see what had upset her so badly. “He had a book with him. Maps, I suppose, or directions. He kept looking down at it and back up again. Then he would look around for landmarks or tracks.”

  She stared up at me with eyes gone dark with intensity. “What kind of book? Where did he find a book containing sufficiently accurate coordinates to enable him to navigate the interstices?”

  I lowered myself to the pavement beside her. “I don’t think he knows anything about dimensional drift or interstices, whatever that is.”

  She shook her head. “The multiverse is too complex to negotiate without a super-complex chaos mapping system.”

  I shrugged. “When he found the spot he wanted, he watched the ground and the moon until he was happy with whatever he saw. Then he stepped forward, and he was gone.” I hesitated, feeling the same frustration I had felt when confronted with an inexplicable problem in geometry. “It looked as if he was turning a corner, but it wasn’t right or left. I couldn’t make sense of it.”

  She slitted her eyes at me as if I were an interesting math problem. “You experienced a visual interpretation of an extra-dimensional angle?”

  “What’s an extra-dimensional angle?”

  “We live in a three-dimensional universe which we perceive in terms of height, width and depth. You apparently perceived a fourth dimension orthogonal to our familiar three, which you interpreted as a visual phenomenon.”

  “Isn’t time the fourth dimension?”

  She shook her head. “Time is not properly a physical dimension. In order to accurately describe the properties of the universe, we must postulate ten physical dimensions. Adding the putative dimension of time gives us a total of eleven.”

  I rested my elbows on my upraised knees. “You can’t have eleven dimensions. Where would you put them?”

  She met my gaze, but I wasn’t sure she saw me through her glassy excitement. “Some dimensions may be wrapped around others the way you might wrap…” She frowned, looking for a way to describe it. “The way you might wrap Christmas paper around a cardboard tube.”

  “That can’t work.”

  “Others may contain our familiar three dimensions the same way our three-dimensional universe contains infinite two-dimensional universes.”

  “It does?”

  “Picture a loaf of bread. Each slice represents an infinite two-dimensional plane.”

  I nodded. She’d taught me
this much in high-school.

  “In reality, that three-dimensional loaf of bread contains an infinite number of infinite two-dimensional planes all intersecting in an infinite number of angles.”

  I remembered that from her tutoring as well.

  “And in order to move from one two-dimensional slice to another, one would would have to move at an angle in a third dimension. A two-dimensional resident of a two-dimensional universe would be unable to conceive or detect that third dimension. ”

  I was afraid I understood where she was leading me.

  “Now picture a heap of child’s blocks in a toybox. Each three-dimensional block is an infinite three-dimensional universe, and the toybox is an infinite additional dimension which contains all the blocks as the loaf of bread contains all the slices.”

  I nodded again.

  “To move from one block to another, one would have to turn in a direction that does not exist in any of those three-dimensional universes.” She pursed her lips like an offended librarian. “Your friend’s method, employing textual references, would not appear to be an efficient system of mapping.”

  “He thinks he already has all the map he needs to find his gods.”

  “He is attempting to locate para-dimensional entities?”

  I nodded. “He says they lived here before there were dinosaurs, but they didn’t get along with something else that lived here at the same time. They lost the argument and got locked up somewhere outside our universe. Every once in a while, things come into position where someone can get at them, and that’s what Alistair is trying to do. He has some idea that he’s going to wake one up and bring it back here like a stray puppy.”

  “For what purpose?”

  “I think he plans to set it on people he thinks have slighted or ignored him.”

  She nodded. “Megalomania. Extreme narcissism. Possibly fully-fledged sociopthy.”

  “But none of it is even possible. We would know if there was something living here before the dinosaurs, wouldn’t we?”

  She nibbled the inside of her lower lip. “Not necessarily. It would depend on location and biology. For example, soft-bodied organisms might not leave fossil evidence, or that evidence might have been destroyed by volcanism or subsumed by altered ocean beds or located in regions inaccessible to us at present.”