The Blackwood Curse: Queen of Corruption

by Melissa McCann

  I sat by the window on my little daybed, stroking my thumb over the ropy scars on my cheek and trying to plan a kidnapping.

  As night coiled around Woodhill, I began to feel uneasy. Something Alistair had said or done rose from my memory and spilled into my conscious mind—something in the way he had smirked, making a little too much melodrama out of his soon but not at once and his be ready for my summons.

  Signs and suggestions realigned and solidified. I jerked upright and picked my watch off the table beside my bed. I had been mulling over plans until half eleven. What time would Alistair’s gate open?

  “Mother,” I shouted. I scrambled out of my pajamas and into jeans. I kept the cotton pajama shirt—no time to change it—and shuffled into my boots.

  She opened her bedroom door, pushing her arms into the sleeves of her quilted robe. “Henry, what are you shouting about?”

  “Alistair is going tonight. I have to stop him.” I threw my coat on over my pajama shirt.

  She tried to catch my arm. “Henry, don’t you dare go out.”

  “I’ll be back.” I grabbed my cane and staggered out into the street.

  Alistair had always planned to leave tonight for the final time. His coyness about waiting and how he would send for me had been a tease. He had been lulling me to give him time to make his escape. Adrenaline suppressed the pain in my hip, and I crossed lawns and plowed through hedges, half-sure I had already missed my chance to stop him.

  But no, when I stumbled around the corner of Elm, there stood Alistair in his dead father's clothes, laughing and clapping his hands. “I knew it,” he crowed. “I knew you would divine my intentions.” He stepped back toward the gateway blooming in the air behind him.

  “Stop,” I gasped. “Wait.”

  “So you can interfere with my plans?” He wagged one finger like an old auntie. “I knew you must have followed me as far as the portal. Do you have some idea of abducting me for my own protection? I know you, my good and worthy friend.”

  “Don’t go,” I huffed. How had I become so weak in just a few months? A year ago, I had been able to run all day carrying twice my own weight on my back. “It’s foolish. Dangerous.”

  He laughed, impish as a schoolboy. “No need to rush, Henry. We have all the time in the universe. Minutes and minutes.”

  A few steps would put me in arm’s reach. All I had to do was take him down and hold him until the door shuffled in on itself and disappeared.

  “Oh, dear faithful Henry,” Alistair said. “I knew you would never fail me.” He stepped back. I had already reached out to him, already thrown my weight into the lunge. Just before he turned a corner neither right nor left, his outstretched hand caught my sleeve. I tried to recoil at the last minute, but his hand disappeared into the unfolding interstice. I expected, as before, to lose hold of him and stumble unaltered through the space which seemed to contain the portal, but this time—whether it was an act of Alistair’s will or a property of the portal itself—his hand seemed to fuse to my sleeve. Before I could set my weight against him, my own hand followed his, and I fell forward into the turning hole in the world.

  I folded into an origami soldier, creasing and crumpling, bones and skin and flesh turning inside out in the space of a breath. Then I unfolded into my own shape and stumbled, disoriented, as if I had been in free fall for a moment.

  Alistair had let go my sleeve. Now he laughed and clapped his hands like a child at a birthday party. “I brought you through. I hardly dared hope I could do it.”

  I seemed to stand on the same street, seeing the same houses and trees I had been looking at a moment earlier. “But we haven’t gone anywhere,” I protested.

  “Farther than you can imagine and yet less than the width of an eyelash,” he said. “This is a half-world, a mere step to one side of our own. Our journey lies yet long before us.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” I said. I turned toward the place where the gate should have been, but the mandala door had disappeared. I waved my hand through the air, took a step and tried to turn a corner that didn’t exist in a knowable universe. Nothing happened.

  “There is no way back, Henry,” Alistair said behind me. “The portals which permit the movement of mortals between the worlds lead only one direction. The gate exists still in our own world—though only for a few minutes more. Then it will close—the pin withdrawn, to use my dear Miss Fee’s notion—for another ten-thousand years.”

  I turned back on him. “You’ve trapped us here?”

  “We are certainly not trapped,” he said. “When I have awakened my beloved from her aeons-old sleep, then, if you still desire it, I will send you back to your own world, there to await my return at the head of my lady’s horde.”

  My jaw tightened. “You know I want nothing to do with your goddess, and I have no desire to conquer the universe with you.”

  He cast his eyes down like a coquette. “Henry, why must you be this way? I am embarking on the greatest adventure since the dawn of the first age. Surely your bold warrior’s heart burns to witness the moment which will unleash the transformation of a world.”

  He had finally come close to the truth behind all his posing and posturing. He craved a witness to his triumph as he had once craved an audience for his fantastical stories, and I had always played that role for him.

  “Come, there is only one way back and that is forward.” He held his hands out before him, wrists together. “Would it satisfy you to bind me?” He gave me the impish smile he had adopted in his current persona. “I will submit if you require it.”

  “Don’t be an idiot,” I snapped.

  He laughed. “Dear Henry. So simple and honest.” He stepped within my reach, confident I would do nothing to stop him, and he was right. I cursed myself for running out into the night unprepared and unarmed but for a light aluminum cane, confident I could restrain Alistair with my bare hands.

  Even if I had a weapon, it would be no use to me. If I believed him, he couldn’t reverse what he had done to bring me here. Shooting him would stop him from completing his quest, but it would trap me in whatever universe I was in now. And anyway, Alistair knew as well as I did that I could never pull a trigger against him.

  He seized my sleeve and pulled me forward, still smiling like Peter Pan full of fairy dust and off to Neverland. "Hurry,” he cried. “Everything now is time and gravity."

  I ground my teeth, but I had no choice.

  As he half-dragged me down the street, I began to see I had made a mistake. The houses looked on the surface like the Victorian and Craftsman era homes I knew, but the lights in the windows were too flat and bright. Had I gone closer, maybe I could have looked through into the rooms beyond, but nothing in the world could have induced me to do it. The creeping sensation between my shoulder blades made me think that whatever looked back at me would be just human enough for horror.

  "Where are we?" I asked Alistair.

  “It has no name,” he answered.

  As we went, the neighborhood grew less and less like my own Woodhill. The houses began to sag and slump like rotting pumpkins, then to run like wax. The pavement of the street seemed to ooze underfoot. I thought we passed Blackwood House, or some version of it. Somehow, it seemed the more horrible to me because it looked no different on that alien plane than in the world I knew.

  At last, on a street lined with trees that seemed to twist and bend without wind, where shadows detached themselves from the objects that cast them and crept after us like a swarm of starving and malignant children, we approached one of those endlessly shuffling angles. Alistair dragged me, stumbling, around a mind-wrenching corner and into a world utterly alien to my own.

  My bones turned to lead. Wherever we had emerged, the gravity was higher than in our own world. Loose rocks slid under my feet, and I struggled to maintain my balance. My eyes adjusted to the murk enough for me to make out something of our surroundings; we had emerged on the side of a slope. Fangs of dead rock lay around us like a
heap of pointed teeth. Bigger teeth jutted at irregular angles both upslope and down, embedded, I thought, in the pyroclastic flow of a volcanic eruption in the distant past. Or not so distant. Windblown sand or dust should, in the pressing gravity, have scoured down the cutting points and edges of the teeth, but I quickly learned to pull my sleeves down over my hands to protect keep them from being cut to ribbons.

  I couldn’t see much beyond fifty yards in any direction. Darkness contracted this world to a dim radius. As far as I could tell, the universe might not exist but for the faint circle that traveled with us. Whatever provided that hint of illumination, I couldn’t make out a sky at all, much less a luminary.

  Alistair coughed. The air smelled of ashes and burned my throat and nose. My head spun as if there weren’t enough oxygen in the smoky atmosphere. I followed Alistair, hurrying to gain ground before he passed out of my radius of visibility.

  The increased gravity punished my weak leg, and I gritted my teeth and pushed against the pain. Alistair picked a route that curved up and around the rocky slope between jagged crops of rock that emerged out of the gloom ahead and faded into gloom behind. The shallow rise felt steep as a cliff face, and my lungs burned as I hyperventilated, trying to get enough oxygen out of the wasted air.

  Even the sounds we made seemed muffled in the heavy atmosphere, so I didn’t hear the new sound until I stopped to lean against a tooth of rock and pant, using my sleeve to filter some of the smoke or corrosive ash that burned my throat and lungs. In the brief silence between my breaths, something rustled outside my field of view like the warning of a rattlesnake or the scuffle of a mouse through dry leaves.

  “Alistair,” I rasped. “Alistair, there’s something…”

  “Don’t stop,” he said.

  I pushed after him. I had let myself lapse, physically weakened by the months of incapacity and rehabilitation in the hospital, but morally drained as well. I had favored my bad leg too long and allowed myself to grow weak until even Alistair could outpace me. I tightened my jaw and pushed myself to keep up.

  Some of the rock teeth around us had shattered or split, leaving shards of assorted sizes. I scanned the ground as I went until I spotted a triangular slice a little longer than my hand with a pointed tip. I picked it up, but the point had a split I had missed at first glance. I discarded it and searched for another. I picked up a few broken points and put them in my pocket, discarding one whenever I found a better prospect until I settled on a single long piece of broken stone with one sharp edge and a good sharp point. It wasn’t a knife, but a hard thrust would drive it through a fleshy target.

  The rustle grew louder, and I began to hear it not only behind but around us. Something jumped to the top of a rock by my right side. I shied and caught my balance on my cane. A rough cone of rock about the size of my fist stood high on three hard, stick-like legs that bent at a single joint and dug into the surface of the bigger rock with hooked toes. The pointed carapace spun a few full revolutions, and the creature bounced like a child’s toy on its bent legs. A three-part beak pouted from the underside, sagged for a moment, drooling something dark, then retreated back into the body. Little rocks stirred all around me, and I decided I wasn’t as tired as I had thought.

  A stream cut our path, rolling over small rocks and curling around the bigger stones in its bed. The gravity flattened its surface so it didn’t leap or splash but flowed like treacle over and around obstructions. Alistair crossed without hesitation. The water came to his knees, soaking the legs of his father’s suit.

  If the water buoyed me up at all, I couldn’t feel it. The flat surface resisted splashing, and that seemed to make it harder to drag my legs through it.

  The short crossing felt like fording a river. I staggered out and looked back. The rock tripods scuttled back and forth along the edges of the stream. They dipped their pointed toe-claws in the water and pulled them back out, spinning their bodies in excitement or agitation. I hoped we had escaped pursuit, at least from that quarter, but the tripods I could see in the dim light were only the vanguard of an army. In a moment, the mass of rock creatures pushing up from behind forced the front rank into the water. The little stone things in the water spun and thrashed for a few seconds, then sank under the treacly surface as more of their species clambered over them.

  Behind those, the ground bumped and rolled like a landslide. In moments, the pursuers would form a bridge or dam across the stream like army ants. For the first time since leaving the hospital, I wished I could reach for a rifle, a handgun, anything to discourage the swarm. My makeshift knife would be no use against these little monsters.

  The slope on this side of the stream climbed more steeply, and a stone spire emerged out of the thick air at the top of the mound. It crowned the peak like a monument. Alistair crawled the last yard to the foot of the monolith. He crept around the foot of the obelisk, and I followed, leaning on the side of the stone tower, and stumbled over a section of pipe as big around as my thigh. I glanced down at a broken segment of a rock-tripod leg—hollow in the middle. Seeing that, I finally connected the spire against which I leaned with the little tripods swarming after us. It wasn’t a rock formation but the carapace of a rock tripod the size of a bus resting on its end. A tripod long dead, by the evidence of that shattered leg. I looked back down the slope, ignoring for the moment the movement of small rocks on the near side of the stream. The rocks around which Alistair and I had clambered all had the same general shape. The rock creatures varied infinitely in detail, but all tended to a cone, wide at the base and narrower at the peak.

  I looked up the length of the spire. If the creatures grew with age, how old would the thing above us be? And how much of its length lay beneath us, buried in volcanic stone?

  I caught up with Alistair just as he climbed all the way to his feet. The portal unfolded out of a crack in the side of the monolithic shell of the ancient tripod. He took hold of my coat, pulled, and I stumbled around a corner of the universe into glare and heat.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  I dropped to my hands and knees, squeezing my eyes shut. Hard white crystals burned my cut palms. I raised my head, shading my eyes with one hand, squinted across the glittering white plain unbroken by any intrusion or landmark of any kind. The ground didn't rise or fall, nor could I make out even the curve of a horizon. The white salt desert blended into a glaring sky.

  At least the terrible, dragging weight of gravity had dropped from my back. The air here smelled of ozone, but it swept the fog out of my head. Alistair didn’t give me long to rest. He tugged at my shoulder, pulling me forward. "Come," he said. "The door is moving, and if we fail to intercept it, we may be trapped here."

  He made this statement as calmly as if it were of no more consequence than missing a bus. I got to my feet. Alistair had already gone ahead, and I limped along in his wake as he made straight for some landmark I couldn't see.

  I happened to glance to my right and saw, far away, two tiny, upright figures moving, as it seemed to me, in the direction opposite to our own. I seized Alistair's elbow and called his attention to the moving figures. Alistair pointed off to our left. There, I saw at a great distance two more figures identical to the others, although these seemed not to move but to stand in some kind of consultation. "Come," Alistair said. “The door is ever in motion, and we must overtake it."

  He hurried away, faster than before, and I saw one of the figures move ahead of its companion. Looking to my right, I saw that there, too, one of those tiny objects had moved ahead and left the other behind.

  Soon after that, I saw ahead of us in the distance the specks of two more pairs moving steadily—one pair to the left, one to the right as if a single pair had doubled and the resulting reflections now moved apart at a steady pace. Had something like that happened when we entered this world?

  My mouth and eyes burned in the dry air, and the heat rivaled that of the Persian desert. I soon felt a trickle of moisture on my upper lip. Touching my face, I fou
nd blood on my fingers.

  “Alistair, how do you know where the gate is?”

  “Be quiet,” he snapped, and I realized he had been counting under his breath in time with his steps. I clenched my jaws shut for fear of making him lose his count.

  Deep in concentration, he strode across the salt plain, his steps fast but measured. I couldn't help him even by keeping us on a straight course as there was no landmark to measure by. There was a peculiar terror in knowing I must rely entirely on Alistair who himself had no guide but his own steps. I tried to comfort myself with the knowledge that he had passed through this world at least once, but I found I wasn't reassured until a pain went through my right eye, and an un-light rift shuffled out of the air in the distance. At first, I was alarmed to see the portal well to the right of us. If we didn’t change course, we would pass it by, and Alistair, I knew, couldn’t see it. I still hesitated to admit my own queer ability to see his doors. Anything that annoyed Alistair endangered my own chance of getting home, but I would have to risk it if he didn’t correct his course soon.

  Shortly, however, I realized the rift ahead wasn’t so far to my right as I had first thought. Alistair had been right; the portal was in motion, and its course would converge almost exactly with ours. Near enough, at least, to let us escape this world, which would kill us in a few hours if we couldn’t get out.

  Now that I could see the gate, I found myself stumbling, tilting to one side or the other as if the ground were surging like the deck of a ship. My head ached, but I couldn't be sure whether that was the effect of the light forcing me to squint or the proximity of the gate itself or something else altogether.

  The more I fixed my gaze on the gate, the more the ground seemed roll. I averted my eyes, and my feet became more sure, but now I was aware of it, I still felt or saw or sensed movement, a folding of angles in space. I looked behind us, scanning our footprints, but so far as I could tell, we had walked in a straight line. Straighter, in fact, than we should have done given the complete lack of landmarks by which to steer ourselves. I had the upchurning sensation that Alistair and I were walking a straight line in curved space and that, given an eternity, we would have walked in a complete circle not in the sense of walking around a planet but as if circling a great disk without ever veering to right or left.