Elderkin’s naturally choleric complexion blanched. “The Valley of Shadows? You're talking about the Valley of Shadows? Impossible. It's cut off. It's accessible only once in every... Oh no.”
He scrambled across the little office to the bookshelves and leaped to hook one finger over the spine of a particular book and tip it down onto his own head, followed by four others which he ignored, removing the desired volume from his crown and leafing through it. “Stars in alignment. Gravitational balance point. Gate will open. Forty days and nights. What's your friend trying to do, destroy the world?”
“My friend is attempting to deter his childhood associate from interrupting for malign purposes the hibernation of a para-dimensional alien entity. The childhood associate is a malignant narcissist. He will resist any dissuasion, leaving my friend with no means by which to return to his source coordinates.”
The tome thumped on the desk, raising a plume of mold and dust from its pages. “Young people pitter-pattering all over the universe, poking the Oldest Things. Better wake a shoggoth in mid-mitosis than…” He pawed through the pages. “Where’s the re-entry point into this universe?”
Mora confessed that she did not know.
He stared with open mouth and white face, then clutched the fringes of grey wool over his ears. “How do you expect to get him back when you don’t even know his reentry point? It’s hopeless. It can’t be done.”
“I thought,” Mora replied, “that I might reverse the polarity of the interstices.”
“Reverse the…reverse the…great god Cthulhu, girl, you can’t…”
Mora held out her phone with a formula displayed on the screen. “I had in mind something like this.”
“What in the world are you…” The mathematician snatched the phone from her hand. He squinted. He stared. He put his finger to the screen and moved the image around, expanding sections for closer examination. “Well, you could possibly. No, this bit won’t work, but you could—oh I see. Einstein’s beard, girl, this could work.”
He dropped the phone and fumbled for another book, thumped it open on the desk. “Need the formula for a find and summon circuit.” He used a small almanac to mark a page in the bigger book and pawed the pages back the other way. “Combine the co-factors. Girl, get down that quartz wand, not the pink one, the black one. And the silver paint in that cupboard. Got to copy this out.”
Mora recovered her phone before the agitated mathematician could trample it. She returned it to him with the scanner function already loaded.
“Get down that bottle of water. Got to be distilled, not the tap, not filtered. Take that wooden bowl; can't put water in metal. Now the box of salt. You’ll need brine. Get the iron pyrite—that's fool's gold. Oh, I see you know that. You have copper wire? Strip that lamp cord. Unplug it first. Oh fine, you figured out that much anyway. Got to print this out. How? I say, links right up to the printer, doesn't it. No, I'm not coming. I'm not a sorcerer, you know. That's what you ignorant young people are for, trolloping all over the multi-verse doing gods only know what kind of damage. What about your friend? Got to quantify him somehow. Name works if you can find it. No, not his name. You can't possibly be that ignorant. I'm talking about his name. Find it in that.” He flung a book at Mora.
She had studied the pages, long columns of symbols like Chinese logograms with translations beside each symbol inked in quill pen.
“You need twenty-seven separate terms—that's ideal, but at least thirteen—that describe your friend. You've got the terms for physical descriptors there in the front, quintessentials in the middle, metaphysical properties in the back. Write them on that sheet there—neatly mind you. If they don’t interlock, you’ve got them wrong and you'll pull in something that's almost your friend but not quite, and I mean not quite in a very un-pleasant way. Put the sheet in the circle for the name of the thing being summoned and weigh it down with the iron pyrite, that's the fool's—that's right, you knew that. Ought to have something from his body—hair, skin, toenails—but there’s no time to be picky.”
While Elderkin shuffled computer printouts, Mora loaded the scanned pages into her laptop and manipulated images, superimposing one circle on another, adding and deleting elements.
“Circles can't be round,” Elderkin protested. “Round will warp it. Round will turn things inside-out. It's not natural. Nothing's round. Elipses, or angles but nothing round.”
They ran out of time before they'd perfected the diagram, and had Mora been forced to take a bus, she would not have made it to my departure point in time. Doctor Elderkin, however, seemed to have some idea what sorts of things were likely to happen if Alistair succeeded in waking up his goddess, and he handed Mora the keys to his car.
CHAPTER TWENTY
At Alistair's exit point, Mora dumped her bag, set up her laptop with the diagrams and set to work with the silver paint. She drew an ellipse enclosing the interstice and started marking out smaller shapes and mathematical formulae within the first, setting out quartz and copper, a wooden bowl containing brine made from salt and distilled water, candles at carefully calculated points, and finally my name, a list of twenty-seven qualities she associated with me, printed in heavy silver ink.
“What was all that supposed to do?” I asked.
“Reverse the polarization of the interstices between this universe and Alistair’s destination.”
“You reversed the polarity of the universe?”
“Of course not.” She scowled at me. “I made a limited adjustment within a set of narrowly defined parameters.”
“So Alistair could have brought us back any time he wanted?”
“Unlikely. He lacks the necessary understanding of the underlying mathematical principles. It is the fundamental failing of his approach.”
She took a breath. “So, employing the battery from Doctor Elderkin’s car, I ran twelve volts of current into the conductive paint.”
“Twelve volts is enough to re-polarize the universe?”
She sighed. “As I said,”
“Right. A limited adjustment. Still,”
“The impact of the circuit is not in brute force but in frequency. I believe I see how I could produce a sufficiently refined circuit as to be able to activate it with a cell phone battery.”
“You could not,” I protested.
She silenced me with her affronted librarian look.
“All right, you probably could. It must have worked because I’m here.”
She wagged her head in a yes-and-no gesture. “I was not entirely responsible for your successful return. My adjustments to the para-dimensional alignment of the multi-verse were failing as the inter-penetrating universes pulled further apart in higher-dimensional space. I had no other power source, and I do not possess sufficient understanding of Dr. Elderkin’s circuit diagrams to refine the one that held the universes together. If I did not either cut the power or increase it, the circuit would fail and space-time would rebound.”
“Rebound as in a rubber band snapping?”
“Approximately.”
“What effect would that have on your circuit?”
“I calculated the blowback would be contained sufficiently within the circuit perimeter as to vaporize no more than three or four meters with diminishing damage no further than a few hundred yards radius.”
My breath turned icy in my chest. “What in the world were you thinking?”
Mora seemed unperturbed by the prospect of sudden death. “I would have disconnected the power source before that occurred. It would serve no purpose and do extensive damage with high risk of loss of life in the surrounding area. However, I was not required to make that determination.”
My chest unlocked a degree. “I got through in time.”
“Not precisely. The circuit received input from an external power source.”
“What power source?”
She tilted her head. “I can only hypothesize that the power source was you.”
I waited
for her to explain the joke.
She said, “I had begun to believe I would have no choice but to disconnect and go back to Dr. Elderkin with no appreciable possibility of relocating and retrieving you. At that point, however, the battery began to spark and smoke.
“Within the circuit, the iron pyrite shattered, and the paper containing your name ignited. There were a number of visual effects which I cannot objectively verify as other than optical illusions or hallucinations as I did not have time to mount a camera to record the procedure. The lettering which expressed your metaphysical name did not burn with the paper. Rather, it appeared…or disappeared...”
She cocked her head. “I believe the lettering may have achieved an orthogonal reorientation which I was unable to observe. The wooden bowl disintegrated, and the brine appeared to boil upward before converting explosively to steam. Possibly a localized gravitational effect. The candle flames disappeared, but the wax continued to oxidize. I have not yet determined whether the optical effect was a property of the candles or of photon alterations within the circuit.”
I shook my head. “I couldn’t have done any of that.”
“Nevertheless, shortly after the influx of new energy, you fell out of the air into the center of the circuit.”
Something swelled in my undermind, a memory that climbed toward my consciousness like bile rising in the throat the moment before vomiting. The psychic manifestation under my bed shrieked, a sound like mortal terror, and I clapped my hands to my eyes, struggling to suppress the memory of a lifted veil and something underneath.
“Hal?” Mora’s warm hand gripped my wrist and squeezed. I heard the buzz of the nurse’s call button. “Hal, what’s wrong?” Still squeezing my wrist, she dug her fingertips into my throat at the pulse point. I had begun to pant and sweat.
The little monster squealed. Musn’t wake the king, Hal Darling. He’s dreaming you. Or you dreaming him.
I forced myself to breathe in and out, counting my rapid heartbeats. I heard Mora saying something about a headache. I choked down the memory, forming a cellar in my mind and shutting it inside, bolting doors and locking chains behind it.
Warm fingers pressed something to my lips, and I opened my mouth for a bitter tablet. When I felt the rim of a paper cup, I dropped my hand from one closed eye and took the cup from Mora, washing the pill back.
Little Samoth sobbed and whimpered. Can’t keep him out, Hal Darling, not forever.
I shut door after door and locked each one.
“What is it?” Mora asked again.
I turned the key in the last door and opened my eyes. “Something did me a favor.”
The memory swelled and pushed against its prison walls. “Alistair called him the King. He was going to kill me, then he changed his mind. Instead, he made me look at his face. I should have lost my mind then. I think I did go a little mad. But after that, I was strong enough to run, and the gates stayed open for me just long enough to let me through.”
She squinted into mid-air for a moment, possibly converting my story into nice clean calculations. She came back. “It is sufficient that you are home by whatever means. Observing your condition on arrival, I telephoned for an ambulance and called your mother. You have been here since the paramedics brought you.”
“How long was I actually gone?”
“You re-entered this universe at five-twenty-seven the morning after your departure.”
“The morning after as in I was gone for six hours?”
“Approximately.”
“That’s not possible. It had to have been at least a day. Alistair said it was eighteen hours to get to the valley. It must have taken at least that long to get back.”
She gave me the disappointed librarian look. “You are the one who assigned me to read about Narnia.”
“You mean time runs that much faster in all those worlds?”
“Very unlikely,” she said. “However, time does pass in the retrograde in roughly half of all potential universes.”
“Backward?” I said. “Time can’t run backward. I would have noticed.”
Killing time, Hal Darling. Off with his head, and have another cup of tea. I glanced around for something I could use to swat at the thing under the bed.
“Retrograde relative to this universe,” Mora explained, not very helpfully. “From inside those universes, you would not observe the phenomenon. Your headache appears to have returned. Would you like another analgesic?”
I had been unconsciously rubbing my forehead. I dropped my hand. “It’s more of a metaphysical pain. I don’t think an aspirin will help.” My eyes had started drooping shut whenever I forgot to hold them open, and the room was starting to swim with alien angles I didn’t want to see.
“You’re tired,” Mora said. “You have sustained significant physical trauma in addition to unaccustomed exertion.”
Mora turned into a gothic Alice then back to herself as waves of sleep rolled over my head, and Little Samoth giggled. White Knight can’t stay on his horse, Hal Darling. Better not fall off now. She’s coming. She’ll eat your head.
The next time I roused, I heard my attendant monster giggle from its perch on my chest. Time's up, Hal. Have to join the dance. Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, won't you join the dance? I batted at it, missed, and felt it do a little padding troll-dance on my chest before scuttling to the foot of the bed.
“Wake up, Crompton; it's time you answered some questions.”
I cracked a lid at the speaker, a short, woman with burnt-umber skin in a plain gray suit—blue-striped button-down shirt belted tight into gray trousers, hips and breasts ballooning above and below. She stuck a badge in my face, holding it a few inches from my left eye. “Detective Griffith. Seattle police. Woodhill precinct. This is detective Tuttle.”
I cracked the other eye. A long, sad man with basset-hound eyes shook his head as if I'd disappointed him just by being there.
I scrubbed my face with my palms and tried to drag myself up on my pillow. My mother and Mora had both left the room, and light around the edges of the window blinds suggested mid-afternoon.
Griffith didn’t wait for me to get my wits together. She barked, “Where were you last night?”
I clenched my teeth against a yawn and scratched my chest where my personal monster’s claws had pricked me. I had the eerie sense of being the only sane person in Wonderland.
Something chuckled from the foot of my bed and muttered, All mad here, Hal darling. I tried to kick it without attracting attention, but it had a way of not being exactly where it seemed.
“I’m pretty sure I was right here,” I said.
Griffith loomed at me. “Where were you before that? You show up here banged up and half dressed, full of bullets and…that…” She waved a hand at my scarred face, her own face twisting in an involuntary grimace.
“Mugged, I suppose,” her partner suggested as if were a moral failing.
I decided general amnesia was my best strategy. “I don’t remember exactly what happened.”
Griffith curled her lip. “Drop the act, Crompton. The doctor said no head injuries, so that won’t wash.”
Detective Tuttle sighed deeply. “Drugs. Cocaine. Rohypnol. Ecstasy. Overdose.”
“Not that I remember,” I said.
“Don’t try to get cute with us,” Detective Griffith snarled.
I sifted through memories for something I could give them. Alistair had shot me; Mora’s math had helped me escape the Valley of Shadows. I had fled. I remembered His garden, and meeting Him and his dogs. I pressed the heels of both hands into my eyes as if I could squeeze an image back into the memory pit from which it threatened to emerge. There wouldn’t be any remembering that. Not if I wanted to keep my brain in my skull. Then there had been worlds and worlds, familiar and not, stumbling along on legs fueled by hysterical strength.
I dropped my hands. “I remember finding Mora.”
“Mora Fee, the woman who brought you to the hospit
al. Is that who shot you?”
“Mora didn’t shoot me,” I said. “That happened earlier. It was dark; he had a flashlight in my eyes. I never saw the gun.”
Griffith snorted. “Where did this shooting take place?”
“I don’t know, exactly. I don’t think I could find it again.
“How did you get there?”
I shook my head. “I was out looking for Alistair. I got lost.”
She leaned toward me. “You need to start remembering something, Crompton. There’s a house fire and two people missing.”
I jerked upright, thrashing to get my legs untangled from the thin blanket. My bruised ribs seized, and I dropped to the mattress. “My mother?” I wheezed, wrapping my arm around my ribs. “Is she all right? Where’s Mora?”
“Who's talking about your mother? Why wouldn't she be all right?”
The door behind the detectives swung open without a knock, and Mora slipped through. My chest unclenched a little at the sight of her. At least she hadn’t been involved in any fire. She looked past the detectives to me. “Hello Hal.” She let the door whisper shut behind her.
For a moment, I thought Griffith and Tuttle must be as unreal as the thing that squeaked and darted under the bed in response to Mora's arrival because she took no notice of them except to steer around Tuttle on her way to my other side.
“Excuse me,” Griffith growled. “Do you mind?”
Mora blinked as if she had just discovered someone else in the room. “Not at all,” she said, blithely unaware of the authority of police to bully civilians.
Griffith dug both her thumbs into her belt, not touching her service weapon but calling attention to it. “You'll have to wait until we're done interviewing this suspect.”
Mora knotted her brows. “As Hal was here under observation during the incident in question, he cannot defensibly be categorized as a suspect.”
I said, “Mora, is my mother all right? These officers said...”
“Detectives,” Griffith interjected, “And we're not done here.”
“...something about a fire and my mother,” I finished.
The Blackwood Curse: Queen of Corruption Page 18
