Mora flicked Griffith and Tuttle her strict librarian look. “I surmise that they refer to the burning of Blackwood House last night.”
Blackwood House. Nothing to do with my mother. “What happened?”
Mora said, “Ignition occurred at roughly two o' clock this morning. Neighbors reported screams carrying over the sounds of the fire and other noises they couldn’t properly identify. Speculation is presently running from bears to elephants.”
“In Woodhill?”
“That is the approximate consensus.”
My neighbors had developed very peculiar imaginations.
“What were the Blackwoods doing with bears?” Griffith demanded.
“Alistair never mentioned bears to me,” I said, feeling that truth made the most believable lie.
Mora said, “A more probable scenario suggests the presence of a previously unknown accelerant causing atypical airflow resulting in a roaring or bellowing effect.”
Griffith barked, “What do you know about accelerants, Crompton?”
“Was Verna Blackwood inside?” I asked Mora.
“While the screams suggest that to be the case, the crime scene unit found no human remains in the wreckage. Or bears,” she added with a slight frown at the detectives.
Griffith interrupted. “What was your beef with the Blackwoods, Crompton?”
I barely heard her. Alistair...could Alistair have survived the gunshot after all? Those tiny bullets could bounce off a skull if they didn’t hit straight on, but I had seen his head fall back, felt his grip slacken. I had seen his dead eyes. What had Alistair’s monstrous goddess done to him?
My face felt numb, and my vision had begun to blur. “He couldn't leave her behind.”
Griffith pounced. “Who couldn’t leave who?”
“Whom,” Mora said helpfully. “I believe Hal refers to Mr. Blackwood’s neurotic attachment to his mother.”
Detective Griffith glowered at me. “You mean he burned his own house down and killed his mother?”
“Not killed her,” I murmured. “He hates her, but he would never leave her.”
“What, so he’s crazy? Is that what you’re saying, Crompton?”
“Insanity is an insufficiently precise diagnosis,” Mora interjected. “He has a narcissistic attachment to his mother.”
Poisoning was a strange thing to be attached to, but it would probably be unwise to mention poison in front of Detective Griffith.
She leaned close, bringing her face within a few feet of mine. “Your story doesn’t hold water, Crompton. You know what’s going on here, and I’m going to find out what it is, and when I do, I’ll be there to put the cuffs on and read you your rights.” She scowled as if she resented that last part already. Then she scowled her partner into submission and prowled out of the room with a last snarl over her shoulder for my benefit.
I relaxed with a sigh, already exhausted by the short encounter. “What do they think I did? I was right here when the fire started.” I raised my head. “Wasn’t I?”
Mora set her everything-and-the-kitchen-sink bag by my knees and leaned her computer against it. “They hope, by disorienting you, to establish a connection between your alleged mugging and the disappearance of Alistair and his mother.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“I doubt they have formulated a coherent hypothesis. However, you appeared with bullet wounds, multiple contusions, severe dehydration, and delirium all without explanation shortly before the fire and the disappearance of the Blackwoods.”
“Mora, I saw Alistair die.”
She nodded slowly, her eyes fixed on the middle distance. “He died, however, in the presence of an extra-dimensional alien entity of effectively unlimited power.”
“Meaning death is more of a guideline than a rule.”
All the queen’s horses and all the queen’s men, muttered the thing under the bed. They put Humpty Dumpty together again. Coming to eat your head, Hal darling.
The horror in Alistair’s eyes right before he died, and even death had betrayed him. Once his goddess had him, there was no escape.
“But he can’t get back. You said I almost didn’t get through myself. “
“I do not believe he can return by his original route. However, as I said, he has a para-dimensional entity…”
“…of unlimited power. I know. But she’s still trapped there. She couldn’t leave her temple to come after me. She had to use…” I displayed my hand with the winding threads Slethyrl had used like a net to try to drag me back to her.
“She may be trapped, but Alistair is not. The Valley of Shadow, as he calls it, is inaccessible from this universe by way of the interstices, but there are other other universes and other ways to manipulate the relationships between those universes.”
“He doesn’t have your algorithm.”
“He has other resources.”
I shuddered. “He still has his book.”
She nodded. “That and the power of a para-dimensional…”
“Thingummy. I know.”
“Which provides him with the means to reach our world. All he requires now is a means by which to free his entity from its containment.”
“Can he do that?”
“It would be unwise to presume that he cannot.”
Alistair at the head of an army of deformed parodies of humanity, overrunning the Earth, trampling and devouring every living thing they met, tearing women and children to pieces, and behind them all, the coiled and looping thing that was Slethyrl.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Doctor Traeger released me the next morning with the assurance that as long as I didn’t do too much walking, I could exert myself as I liked. My mother interpreted that as a prescription for bed rest.
I lay against a pillow with my age-worn copy of Alice in my hands and flipped through the pages, letting the familiar words lull me into a half-doze that turned into a kind of waking dream in which Alistair and I lay under a willow on a sunny bank by the side of a stream.
“It was all a mistake, you know,” Alistair said with his hands behind his head. He wore his father’s old clothes and a straw hat tipped over his eyes.
“I saw you die.” I lay beside him with my arms folded across my chest, soldier’s muscles unblemished by scars. Somewhere out of sight, Little Samoth chuckled and burbled like the voice of the stream.
“Oh that,” Alistair scoffed. “That was nothing but a misunderstanding. I’ve explained everything.”
“To who?”
“The Red Queen,” he said as if he thought I should already know this. “She’s awake and waiting for me to open the door.”
Off with their heads, Hal darling, the river chortled.
“And your mother? Is she there with you?”
He gurgled with laughter, or maybe it was the rising river. “Don’t worry about Mama. I’m taking good care of Mama.”
The water rose over its banks, and a wave of sludge slopped against me.
“I’ll see you soon, Hal darling,” Alistair said. Something plopped into the river, and I turned to see Alistair gone and only a straw hat floating on the water.
A knock jolted me awake, and I slapped at my right arm and chest, expecting to feel filthy river ooze, but my sleeve was dry.
My mother answered the door, and Claire Green said, "Hello, Mrs. Crompton. Is it okay if Nathan says Hi to Mr. Crompton?"
"Of course, dear," my mother said. "Henry can't walk around just now, so I'm sure he wants company."
Nathan bounced into the apartment ahead of his sister. "Hi, Hal. My mom said you got hurt, so I made you a card that says get well soon."
He presented me with a sheet of folded drawing paper. He had illustrated the cover with a picture of me confronting a dragon with my flaming broadsword while my flying rhinoceros swooped down preparatory to driving its horn into the monster. I opened the card in which he had printed Get Well Soon. Love Nathan and Claire.
He bounded onto the
bed. "How come you got those lines on your face?"
Claire had followed her brother into the house. "Nate, Mr. Crompton might not feel like talking."
My mother came in from the kitchen with three plates of cookies. "Never mind, Claire. You sit down and visit. I'm sure Henry will be happy to tell you and Nathan all about his adventure." She slitted one eye at me to convey the idea that I was to restrict myself to the G-rated version.
"Thank you, Mrs. Crompton." Claire took the plates and distributed them to me and Nathan before she assumed my mother's antique rocker.
Nate’s huge eyes fixed on my face. "What adventure did you have? Was it dragons?" He jammed his mouth full of cookie.
First I was the Boo Radley of Woodhill. Now I was apparently Saint George. Or possibly Bilbo.
“There aren’t real dragons.” Claire sounded a little sad as if she sympathized with her brother on this point.
"No dragons," I said. “Plenty of other things. There were some giant floating spiders.”
“How big? I don’t like spiders, but Claire’s not afraid of ‘em.”
“About as big as a car.” I thought this detail would put the story squarely in the realm of fantasy, but Nathan nodded as if it was just as he expected.
“How’d they float? Weren’t they too big?”
“Like a blimp,” Claire put in. Blimps can be as big as airplanes.
“Oh yeah. What else?”
“There were these rock things that walked around on three legs. They could spin their bodies all the way around and they had a kind of sharp beak underneath. In another place, we went through a garden, and there were dogs there that burned like fire and hunted us.” A memory threatened to climb out into the light, but I pushed it back down.
“Who’s we?” Nate asked.
“My friend Alistair.”
“How come you took him?” He sounded aggrieved.
“You’re too little to go on adventures,” Claire said.
“Am not,” he protested. “Kids do adventures all the time in books.”
“Those are stories, not real life.”
Nathan smirked. “This is a real life story, so I can go on adventures if I want.”
I had lost the thread of the dispute, and even Claire looked confused.
“Alistair is the one who took me. He wanted me to keep him company on his way to meet someone, but she turned out to be a monster.”
Nathan frowned. “How come he wanted to meet a monster?”
I tried to think of a way to explain Alistair to a nine-year old. “He thought if he made friends with her, other people would respect him.”
“No he didn’t,” Claire said.
Nate and I both looked at her. “He wanted to be powerful. Like Sauron,” she explained to her brother.
His eyes went big, and he turned back to me. “Really? He wanted to be like Sauron?”
Claire rocked the chair gently with her toes and said to her brother, “You don’t want to be friends with a monster unless you want to scare people or hurt them.”
Nathan regarded his sister with credulity appropriate to the Oracle at Delphi. “But what if it’s a good monster?”
She shook her head. “You don’t go out and look for a good monster to be friends with. Friends just kind of come.”
Nathan nodded, satisfied, and returned his attention to me. “How come he wanted to be like Sauron?”
“He was lonely. And he liked to make up stories. Like you.”
“What kind of stories?”
I thought about Alistair’s bleak and dreadful universes. “Scary. Wonderful.”
“Did he make friends with it?”
“I don’t know about that.” Alistair’s terrified face, his lips forming the word run. “But it didn’t want to be friends with me.”
“Did you beat it by using a good heart?”
Alistair’s dead eyes as he was jerked down into the dark.
My gaze met that of big sister, and hers flickered with something complex, not precisely pity but a kind of comprehension. “Come on, Nate. Mr. Crompton just got back from the hospital. He probably has to rest.”
“He doesn’t want to rest,” Nate declared scornfully. “He has to tell us how he won.”
"Sometimes the hero doesn’t always win. Sometimes he has to lose to the bad guy first. Then he comes back and wins because he learned a lesson."
"Okay.” Nathan slitted his eyes to better digest this drop of wisdom from his sister. “'Cause it's the middle of the story, right?”
“Only it’s not a story,” Claire said. “So sometimes the hero doesn’t have to win.”
“But if he doesn’t win, he can’t be a hero.”
“Yes he can,” she said. “If Frodo died at the end and Sauron got the ring, wouldn’t Frodo still be a hero?”
Nate blinked rapidly as he digested that idea. “I guess so,” he said finally, as if he knew there was a hole in the argument but he couldn’t quite find his way through it.
The note of the doorbell almost made me weak with relief.
My mother answered the door. “Come in, Mora dear. Henry, it’s Mora. It’s nice you’re here, dear. I have to go out in a minute, and Henry shouldn’t be here alone.”
“I’m not at Death’s door, Mother,” I protested.
Claire brought the cookie plates to my mother. "Is it okay if Nate comes back to see Mr. Crompton some time?" she asked as if they were conferring on a play date for their children.
My mother exchanged the plates for a bag of cookies. "You come back whenever you like, dear," she said to Claire. "Henry gets lonely all by himself. Mora, do you know Claire and Nathan Greene?"
“I believe Hal has mentioned them in a positive context. I’m pleased to meet you,” Mora said gravely.
“It’s nice to meet you, Miss…” Claire stopped, uncertain how to address Mora without knowing her last name.
“Hi Mora,” Nathan chirruped. “Are you Hal’s girlfriend?”
Claire and Mora both turned vivid red, and Claire grabbed her brother’s arm. “Come on. Oh my gosh, you’re such a dork.”
"Bye Hal,” Nathan said. “Tomorrow, you can tell us more about the monsters and stuff." The little man waved on his way out the door in his sister’s wake.
Mora turned grave eyes to me. “They are the children who assisted you when your visual anomalies first became acute?”
“Nathan thinks I’m a hero, and Claire seems to think I’m a book she’s reading to him.”
Mora cocked her head. “I would like to compare notes with her.”
I squinted, trying to make out whether she was teasing me.
My mother had her coat on. “I’m glad you’re here, Mora dear. Henry needs someone to stay with him in case he has a relapse.” She shuffled keys into her pockets and her handbag over her elbow and left us alone.
Mora turned to me. “Have you experienced any relapses?”
“Not that I’ve noticed.” I decided not to count my half-dream under the heading of relapses. I rolled back on the mattress.
“Good.” She eyed the antique rocking chair, and I could read her mind. She wanted to move the rocker to a spot where she could sit to talk to me, but the shape and angle of the chair wouldn’t fit.
“Sit down.” I inched to the far side of the mattress, leaving room for her. She looked from the rocker to the bed, and I crossed my ankles to suggest I saw no reason to sit up.
She perched on the edge of the couch beside me and curled one knee to her chest with her arms hugged around it. “Where is your psychic manifestation?”
“Under the bed.” Little Samoth had been chuckling and gurgling to itself since she arrived.
She bent and peered into the shadows. “I am still unable to detect its presence.”
I felt the creature in the back of my head all the time now, like mental tinnitus.
Mora returned to her original pose, one leg tucked into her chest and the other hanging within easy snatching distance of my revolti
ng shadow. “Are you well enough to discuss the development of a strategy to divert Alistair’s conquest of this universe?”
That question contained too many dubious assumptions to address. I stretched one arm across the empty side of the mattress, hoping to suggest that a girl could lie with her head on my shoulder. “I think he may be satisfied with taking his mother. She’s been the main focus of his anger and resentment all his life.”
See you soon, Hal darling, my pink-eyed bogyman muttered, echoing Alistair’s last words to me in my dream.
Mora couldn’t hear the creature’s contribution, but she apparently agreed with its assessment. “His mother is incidental. A profile of his psychopathy suggests a high probability of escalation.”
“This is Alistair,” I protested. “Not some kind of inter-dimensional Hitler.”
She brought both legs up to the bed and pulled them to her chest. “While Alistair’s monomania has previously gone unsatisfied, his enlistment of a para-dimensional entity of effectively limitless power will enable him to launch an overwhelming assault on Earth which will be entirely unprepared and unequipped to defend itself.”
I tried to wipe out of my memory the carvings on the walls of Slethyrl’s temple in which hordes of deformed parodies of human beings overran and devoured crowds of fleeing people.
Mora said, “I will refine my dimensional model and design an inter-dimensional compass.”
“Sounds reasonable,” I said. “What's my job?”
She bounced up from the couch and retrieved from beside the door a long slender package wrapped in black fabric and tied with a strip of black ribbon. “Mum found this while cataloging the contents of our attic. Investigation suggests an origin of at least four-hundred years. Mum is presently tracing the exact provenance.”
I had to abandon my failed seduction strategy and sit up, careful not to move my healing ribs and shoulder. The ribbon unwound as Mora put the object in my hands. Black silk fell away from a stick of black wood incised down its length with glyphs or sigils. I ran my fingertips over the carving. It didn’t look like anything I had seen before, and I could recognize and read a little Arabic and Cyrillic, and I supposed most people could identify ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.
The Blackwood Curse: Queen of Corruption Page 19
