The Blackwood Curse: Queen of Corruption

by Melissa McCann

  All the time, the call of the hounds grew louder, and they began to flicker among the shadowed trees behind the sunlit orchard.

  I drew my makeshift knife from my pocket and kept moving, hoping to reach the exit before they caught up, but the leaping fire-hounds came faster than I could hobble, and the rumble of hooves sent the birds shrieking out of the trees as a tidal wave of boiling smoke rolled through the dark and twisted woods toward the sunlit path.

  The first of the fire hounds burst out of the woods to my right and sprang across the path, landing cleanly on the other side and turning its white-hot eyes on me. I didn’t stop. The path here was wide enough to keep its teeth out of my neck. More giant dogs appeared among the trees, lean and long as wolfhounds, their shapes flame that neither burned nor gave light.

  They kept pace with me, flashing and leaping among the trees, and two more enormous hounds jumped the track to follow from the other side. Those would give me trouble when I turned aside to meet my gate, but my stone sliver of a knife had dealt with one of them before.

  The hunter was a threat of an entirely different scale. His cat-mount yowled as it emerged from the rolling smoke, streams of darkness spilling from its flanks.

  I kept moving, trusting to the path to keep the hunter at bay as the cat creature careened among the trees, the rider bending over its neck. My arms and shoulders tightened as it reached the edge of the path, but it turned aside, tossing its head, and paced me, keeping among the trees. The rider still bent low, his crowned head barely missing the lowest branches, but his face under the tattered yellow veil turned toward me.

  A flutter against the back of my arm alerted me that if I didn’t turn off the path, I would miss my exit. I clenched my hand on the butt of the stone shard and eyed the hounds between me and the gate, picking my first target, plotting an attack that would get me through their guard.

  A tattoo of hooves warned me, and I dropped and rolled as the cat-mount leaped from behind. Something sliced the air where my neck had been a moment before, then the cat-horse landed square in the middle of the path and whirled to face me.

  I had come up on one knee from my roll. Now I raised my head and looked into the cat-thing’s slit-pupilled eyes. It yowled and pawed the ground with a three-hooved foot, and I saw between its ivory fangs into its red mouth.

  I looked higher, at the rider—bone crown springing from a bone-white brow, tattered yellow veil hanging over the face, tattered surplice over tarnished mail.

  He leaned over the neck of his mount. If there were eyes behind the cloth, they must be glaring directly into mine. The gauntleted hand held the age-tarnished pommel of a bronze sword. The mount had leaped at me from my left, forcing the rider to swing overhand to his off side. It had probably saved my head.

  The catlike mount stepped toward me, planting one foot, then the other.

  I shoved off the ground and climbed to my feet, raising my knife in a reverse grip. If I could get under the sword, I would go for the heart of the cat creature, putting all my weight behind the thrust, and run. Never mind game legs or broken ribs.

  I braced my feet and watched the hunter’s center mass.

  The rider’s hand twitched the reins, and the cat mount sidled two steps closer. It stopped again and glowered at me with its slitted cat eyes. The rider bent. The ragged veil wavered with his breath, and a thin, dry voice hissed like scales on sand.

  “Kneel,” it said.

  My fingers tightened on the knife. “No,” I croaked, surprised to find my voice so raw.

  He drew back, straightening and staring down at me for a moment. Then he raised the sword and pointed at my heart. “Kneel.”

  I shook my head.

  He lowered the sword, the tip pointing straight down at the ground. His mount shook its mane and sidled. Then his laughter seethed like dry scales. The rider sheathed his sword. He heeled his mount a few steps closer, and I took a corresponding step back, wary of the hounds pacing the edges of the path behind me.

  He bent over his mount’s mane. The gauntleted hand rose to the yellow veil.

  I tried to close my eyes, avert my face, throw myself to the ground, but I remained swaying where I stood, staring like a bird at a cobra. The gauntleted fingers took hold of the veil.

  My body stood frozen while I writhed internally for a means of escape.

  He raised the veil.

  The world burst apart, or maybe it was my brain shattering my skull. In either case, I can’t remember what I saw except that I would rather have fallen into Slethyrl’s coils than see it again.

  I do remember something filling me, stretching skin and soul until they cracked and still pouring in. I remember running, neither hounds nor hunter in pursuit.

  I remember gate after gate, the universes shutting up like telescopes while I fell down an endless rabbit hole, crashing through mirrors that flashed un-light reflections of backward worlds. I remember folding and twisting myself through a last interstice, the wrench as two universes almost pulled apart with me halfway between. I remember the smell of green trees and asphalt and the book-dust smell of Mora’s hair. I remember nothing after that.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  I came to myself in waves and flashes, finding myself in a hospital bed in a long room with patients in beds on either side of me. I realized with mixed dismay and relief that I must still be in the burn ward in Atlanta, having had a particularly vivid hallucination and dreaming horrors I could never have imagined in my sane mind.

  The creature that crouched on my chest only reinforced the impression, a tentacled abomination the size of a healthy rat with long white ears. Its feet left claw-holes in the blanket right through the hospital johnny and into my skin. It whispered, Oh my ears and whiskers, Hal darling. You're late. You're late for a very, very important date. It hunkered there, working the tiny palps within its vertical slit of a mouth. Nurses and orderlies came and went, oblivious to it, while it chortled and stared at me with eyes pink as a white rabbit's.

  When I came fully awake, Mora sat upright in the chair beside me with her laptop balanced on her crossed legs.

  Something—the little monster, I presumed—gurgled and burbled under the bed. My memory had returned more clearly. Alistair had dragged me with him to find his hideous goddess. I had got back to my own universe on my own. Somehow.

  Not entirely on my own. There had been the thread, and something else. A bony crown and a yellow veil. My memory veered sharply away.

  “Is there something under the bed?” I said aloud. My voice still rasped, and I coughed.

  Mora started, the set aside her computer and unfolded from the chair. “Hello, Hal.” She stooped and peered under the bed. “What am I looking for?”

  The thing under the bed hissed and snarled.

  “Like Alice's white rabbit got too friendly with a squid by way of a troll. Long white ears, tentacles where the nose should be.”

  “I do not detect its presence.”

  “It's there. I can feel it at the back of my mind like an itch I can’t scratch.”

  She straightened. “Possibly a manifestation of your own psyche induced by contact with Alistair’s para-dimensional thingummy, which I presume you encountered.”

  “There’s nothing like that in my psyche.”

  “The white rabbit being an obvious incorporation of your personal iconography while the squiddy bits represent the extra-normal influence of the alien intelligence.”

  I should never have introduced her to literary analysis. “Did you say squiddy bits?”

  She ignored me. “When I am better equipped with instrumentation, I’ll try to determine whether it materially interacts with the physical properties of our local universe.”

  “It seems familiar somehow.” I rubbed the pinpricks left on my chest by its claws. “It was when Alistair was out looking for his interstices. He was looking under hedges, and I wondered if he was looking for his old gods.” I had pictured Little Samoth in a pit under the rose bushes.


  Under the bed, the manifestation of my imagination, Little Samoth, giggled. Oh my ears and whiskers, Hal darling.

  Someone rapped at the door, and a doctor who looked roughly my age entered with his eyes on a clipboard. He had light-brown skin that shone over his shaved skull. Without looking up, he said, “Mr. Crompton, I’m Doctor Traeger.” He finally raised his eyes, spotted Mora and looked back to me. “Would you prefer that we speak alone?”

  I reached for Mora’s hand, which she’d rested on the edge of my bed. She tried to tug free, but I already had a good grip. “Mora can stay.”

  The young doctor studied the clipboard. “First, I need to ask you a few questions.” He walked me through the routine to establish whether I might be disoriented or suffering from short-term memory loss, a longer version of the test Claire Greene had administered under the direction of her mother the veterinarian.

  When I demonstrated that I knew where and who I was, he said, “Do you remember how you got here?”

  I remembered everything just fine right up until the hunter in the garden raised his veil. I shut down that memory before it could congeal out of my unconscious mind. After that… “I remember finding Mora.” I squeezed her hand. Her fingers twitched in mine, but I wasn’t sure whether she was squeezing back or trying to get away.

  “Well,” the doctor said, “You might recover those memories, or you might not. There’s no head injury, so we’re calling it traumatic memory loss caused by shock. Then there are the bullet wounds.”

  He looked up from his clipboard again and scowled at me. “We cleaned them out and filled you full of antibiotics, but the swabs we cultured contained things—microbes we’ve never seen before.” He looked at me as if he thought I should be able to explain what a bunch of alien microbes were doing in my body.

  “Antibiotics worked, didn’t they?” I flexed my shoulder, testing for signs of flesh-eating bacteria.

  “As of yesterday, you were completely clear of anything we couldn’t identify, and the antibiotics are taking care of the rest. The…uh…spider webs?…seem to have accelerated healing of the wounds.

  Mora said, “The diameter of the strands suggests an arachnid of unprecedented size. They seemed to have the same adhesive and coagulant properties as terrestrial spider webs and acted as a surgical glue.”

  The young doctor frowned at Mora as if he would have liked to ask what she meant by terrestrial, but he went to the next item on my chart. “That was particularly lucky for the abscessed wound in your right leg. We would have thought it was the bite of a very large spider except that there was only one injection point, and it wasn’t any venom we could identify.”

  He waited a moment as if expecting an explanation. When I didn’t give him one, he said, “Apparently someone or something injected you with an anti-coagulant with a protein-disrupting enzyme that, combined with a secondary infection, caused quite a lot of tissue damage in a very short time. The coagulant in the spider silk, or whatever it was…” He gave me another opening to explain, but I waited him out.

  “…countered some of the effect of the venom. If you hadn’t found it, you would have bled to death long before we got to you. In light of that, the stings on your neck seem hardly worth mentioning. A very large wasp or a variety of scorpion?”

  “What about the abscess in my leg?” I asked.

  He stared at me as if I was missing the point. Finally, he said, “We got it cleaned out. It’s draining, the swelling is almost gone, and antibiotics seem to be working.”

  I’d been worried about losing muscle tissue in that leg.

  “That brings us to the tattoos.”

  My monster giggled under the bed.

  The doctor studied me. “So you don’t remember getting tattooed?”

  I remembered the flick and sting of a fingertip across my cheek and the sensation of burning alive. “I have no idea,” I murmured.

  The thing under the bed said, Poor Hal darling, Red Queen’s writing him now.

  The doctor watched me as if he might be able to read my history in the lines on my face. Finally, he said, “All I can think is that you must have spent the night at one truly historic party. Either that or got jumped into a gang.”

  The doctor dithered around, hoping for a more detailed explanation of my condition, but since I couldn’t give him one without winding up on a seventy-two hour psychiatric hold, he eventually gave up and left me alone with Mora.

  She indicated my hand. “The discoloration of the hypertrophic scar tissue?”

  I studied the black threads winding through and around the rippled, ropy scars. “It touched me.”

  She nodded. “You did encounter it, then. And Alistair?”

  “Once he found her, he couldn’t stand it. He put the gun in his mouth and shot himself. He told me to run.” His terrified eyes had met mine as if, in the last extreme, he remembered that he actually cared for me.

  Mora’s fingertips touched the back of my hand for a moment like the brush of a butterfly wing.

  I remembered that touch. “That was you I felt pulling me back through the portals.”

  Her brows rose. “You experienced a tactile manifestation? Interesting.”

  “What was it a tactile manifestation of?”

  “A reversal in the polarity of the interstices specifically calibrated to locate you and return your to your source coordinates.”

  “Is that something all math geeks can do, or do you have to take a special class?” I asked, bemused by her insouciance.

  “It requires specialized tools and information which I did not yet have when I incorporated the graviton slippage and tachyon field data I received from Alistair into my algorithm.”

  “I don’t remember him saying anything about tachyon slippage.”

  “It was implied,” she said, tilting her chin up. “Incorporating the data, it became apparent that Alistair's exit from our world would close shortly after one ‘o clock in the morning. If Alistair intended to find his para-dimensional god thingummy…”

  “I still don’t think that’s a real science-word.”

  She scowled me to silence. “He had to leave that night. I phoned to warn you, but your mother told me you were already gone. That was superlatively unwise,” she added.

  I bobbed my head to acknowledge her point.

  “Clearly, Alistair had no intention of returning to his origin universe, and I still lacked sufficient data by which to map your entire route or locate his re-entry point. That being the case, I could think of only one alternative means of helping you home and only one person at the university who might be able to assist me in the time available.”

  “And that was?”

  “Dr. Elderkin heads the university's occult math department.”

  “I didn’t know the university had an occult math department.” I suspected she might be making it up to tease me.

  She pursed her lips at me. “His classes aren’t listed in the course catalog because no one ever signed up for them.”

  “What if somebody suddenly wants to learn occult math?”

  “They would apply to Dr. Elderkin.”

  “Of course. Obviously.”

  She gave me a may I continue? stare. “I located his office in the basement of a disused dormitory which was closed for repairs. Fortunately, he is acclimated to a largely nocturnal existence and was therefore in his office when I arrived.”

  “Let me guess, he was tall and saturnine and wore a black cape.”

  “He is slightly shorter than myself, and he was, at the time, wearing an argyle sweater with sweatpants.”

  “Did he at least have a skull on his desk?”

  “For what purpose?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Carry on.”

  Filling in the details around Mora’s stilted narrative, the interview went more or less as follows: The mathematician had stared malignantly at Mora and demanded to know what she meant by bothering him, and if he wanted to be hounded by students at
all hours, he'd have got an office in the math building like everyone else.

  Mora had planted her laptop on his desk. “In approximately two-hundred, fifty-one minutes,” she declared, “I will require a para-dimensional energy field sufficient to alter the physical structure of the multiverse in such a way as to pull a native denizen of our local material universe back from his present location and return him to these coordinates.” She pointed to the juncture highlighted on her screen.

  Dr. Elderkin flailed a pudgy hand in protest. “Don’t be ridiculous. You can't just go around bending the universe. It's...it's...it’s untidy.” He squinted at her model. “Where's your native denizen now? Do you mean he's in some other universe?”

  “I believe I have already indicated that to be the case.”

  “No point in trying to get him back, then. He's been pulled to atoms or spread into a thin paste or turned inside out or something.” He lost interest in the screen.

  “I have sufficient cause to believe he has successfully negotiated those hazards and remains in a viable atomic organization.”

  Elderkin snorted. “What cause?”

  “He is presently in the company of a second party who has manifestly replicated multiple successful navigations. However, when they reach their intended destination, that second party will cease to guide the target individual, leaving him unable to return home.”

  “Where are they now?” the wizard, or magician, or mathematician demanded.

  “I have no means by which to determine their immediate coordinates.”

  “Well then, where are they going?”

  Mora said, “I am unable to identify the destination without specific coordinates. The universe in question has been described to me as the incarceration site of a number of para-dimensional alien entities supposedly possessed of technology rendering them...”