Blackwood (23 page)

  Maybe not
the
devil, but definitely
a
devil.

  The
monas hieroglyphica
mocked her from beneath him. In addition to the name and the fact that it was Dee's personal mark, the text said that the design represented the "unity of the cosmos," each part standing in for the moon, the sun, or the elements.

  She closed the book, and moved on to search Roswell's desk. Her neck warmed like someone was behind her, watching her. But the house was deserted, and Phillips would be down any second.

  Behind the desk, she turned to face the room. Empty.

  
You're alone – alone with Roswell's fire hazard.
The doctor's desk was a mess of stacks and volumes and handwritten notes covering pages and pages, some lined and some not. On the ones that weren't lined, sometimes there were diagrams and drawings, lines with arrows at the end, or circles. They made no sense to her, the content of his research notes as jumbled as the material heaped before her.

  There was one tidy spot, at the exact center of the desk. A single oversized journal with a weathered brown leather cover had been placed directly in front of Roswell's chair. It must be more important than the rest. She picked it up and saw that its brass clasp was similar to the one on the box that housed Dee's gun. Interesting.

  She added another couple of legal pads and books to make a pile in her arms, just in case the journal wasn't the jackpot she wanted it to be. Then she selected a spot and sprawled on the floor, setting the notebooks and research materials in a semicircle around her. Her fingers traced the leather book's cover, the surface cool and smooth. She reached up and scratched the snake, which suddenly itched like a bug bite.

  Snapping open the clasp, she flipped open Roswell's journal.

  The man was insane.

  She touched the page, wanting to press down the contents and keep them contained.

  Heavy globs of ink formed scribbled out sections, bleeding into a sketch of John Dee. And notes. Lots of notes. "The key to their return?" bumped up against "The alchemist's promise." Names, including her ancestor Mary Blackwood's – small and circled, included in a short list of others. An arrow extended from the list titled 'Presumed Dead.' The words SLEEPING POWER were written at the side of the sheet in all caps, circled in a repeated spiral.

  Above her, Miranda heard movement. What would Phillips make of the madman's scrapbook before her? She knew he respected Roswell, but this guy seriously needed a new hobby. It was no surprise that Bone was such a tool.

  She turned the page, noting that he'd pasted in some of John White's paintings. Heavy ink highlighted some sections of the art, with notes written messily beneath. A sketch of a Native American hunter from the period apparently concealed a message that Roswell translated into: "The promised land was to belong to him. Become the New London. The home of the Great Work." The next page featured the detail of a flower, and the legend, "The boundary once crossed permits only one return. All must be in readiness."

  " 'Only one return' too many," she said.

  Flicking past a few more pages, she caught photocopied reproductions of letters with words underlined – weapon, prepare, bloodline – and then another page with two words connected by an arrow:

  Weapon ——> Immortality.

  She advanced another page, and saw the one facing it was blank. This was the last page Roswell had used.

  Phillips thumped down the ladder. She didn't look up until he spoke.

  "That took forever…" he said. "I don't want you to think I don't work out, but well, who has the time?"

  He was giving her a little smile. He was playing the normal game. She often played the normal game in her regular life. The one where you pretended your day was fine, that whatever happened didn't solidify your freak status.

  Peering over her shoulder, he said, "Whoa."

  "Nice surfer impression, dude," she said. The normal game only worked if other people played along. No one ever had for her.

  "Is that–" Phillips' expression darkened.

  "Yeah." Miranda wished she could calm the frak down. "It's me."

  The sketch gazed up at them, rendered in Roswell's tooheavy hand, her eyes enormous and black, the snake mark circled on her cheek. The birthmark was more detailed than her features, and for that she was almost grateful. Almost.

  But being grateful was impossible, given the words beside the arrow that extended from the side of her face:

  THE CURSE SURVIVES.

22

Keys

Phillips sat in Roswell's chair, trying his hardest to decipher the meaning of the scrawls and artwork in the doctor's journal. He flipped through the book again, the sequence not making much sense to him. These were the questions – and some of the answers – that had surfaced in Roswell's research. But the notes weren't left for someone else to read. They were the doctor's notes for himself. Phillips didn't know his shorthand.

  What he did know was that Roswell clearly had a better view of how the pieces of Roanoke Island's weird history fit together than they did.

  "No matter how many times you look, it's still crazy," Miranda said. "We should get out of here. Just bring it with us."

  "He's not crazy – this is his life's work. An obsession, but he's not crazy. I don't think."

  Miranda was perched in the stiff leather chair beside the little table. She wasn't looking at Phillips, but at the jeweled gun. Her hands turned it over and over again, as she examined its mechanisms with steady, competent deliberation.

  She peered down its barrel, and his heart pounded. "Miranda, what are you doing?"

  Her focus on the twisted, hammered metal was complete. "This equals immortality. I'm trying to see how it works."

  Phillips would never have spent time dissecting the firearm. He was better with books, with messes people made with their minds. His ancestors and whatever random spirits were around babbled, but he could have sworn they were talking to each other and not him. He pressed them to the back of his awareness anyway, so he could think.

  "I don't get it," Phillips said. When Miranda frowned a question, he clarified, "Immortality."

  She held the gun closer to the lamp on the table, a gem on the grip flashing under the light from the bulb. "What do you mean?"

  "It's such a bad idea. If everyone lives forever – well, just imagine it. Imagine if every person lived forever. For that matter, add every creature." Phillips was aware of the fact he'd never talked to anyone like this, not even Roswell, without wondering whether they'd think he was nuts. "The earth would be overrun. We'd run out of resources to deal with it in a blink of geological time. And then you get all the doom and gloom. Rationing, wars, etcetera."

  "Etcetera?" Miranda half-smiled, but she was completely serious when she looked over at him. "I understand it – sort of. It's not about living forever. It's about not dying. To be able to keep the people you love around forever? I understand that."

  She shrugged and frowned at the trigger, rubbing her thumb across the hammered metal.

  From what Phillips understood of Roswell's journal, love wasn't any part of Dee's motives. The alchemist had identified the North Carolina coast as a place he could experiment on his band of witches and attempt to turn himself – and them – immortal using the weapon he made. If that worked, then the island was to be his launching ground to lash out at the world, to take down the queen herself. When his plan went south, disrupted, Dee and White hid the messages Roswell had teased out of the paintings and letters. Roswell had a number of White's personal letters to Dee, but only a few replies from the alchemist-in-chief.

  Most people agreed that Sir Walter Raleigh and Queen Elizabeth had been a not-so-secret couple. Watching Miranda, Phillips decided Raleigh wouldn't have liked Dee going after his girlfriend's empire. Raleigh must have been Dee's unknowing pawn all along.

  The page under Phillips' hand featured a sketch of a doorway surrounded by trees, bald cypress trunks like fingers reaching out of the ground. According to Roswell's handwriting scrawled around the image, Dee had given the settlers – the ones who "followed him true and were promised" – detailed instructions for traveling past the veil of reality to the place of spirits. There, they could wait as long as they had to for someone to reassemble the plan, to bring them back and complete Dee's agenda. Their lives beyond were tied to the island, not so different than Phillips' and Miranda's own.

  Dee intended to follow the colonists into the spirit waiting room after his own death, and he must have succeeded. His was a long game, and Phillips was afraid he was winning. There wasn't enough here to come up with a strategy to even compete.

  The sigh of frustration was out before he could stop it. "What's in here, it's not everything."

  "How do you know?"

  "These are mainly background details. Roswell must have another notebook somewhere," he said. "There's too many important things missing – like how to trigger the right conditions to bring the settlers back into our reality. And not much from Dee's own hand." Plus, the Blackwoods were barely mentioned in this journal.

  He still wasn't sure how Miranda's family fit into all this, what the traitor thing his gram had written translated to. Dee had a grudge against them – or did he? Had Mary Blackwood been left behind just so he'd have a vessel to inhabit when he returned? Roswell had claimed she was an alchemist like the rest.

  Evil dead guys having secret plans for girls you really liked and wanted to live sucked.

  "You're right," Miranda said. "There's nothing too specific in there – it's more chaos than theory."

  "There's also nothing too specific about the weapon." Which meant nothing about how to heal his mom from its effects. He suspected Dee was the only one who knew how the unpredictable gun in Miranda's hand worked. His magic had created it, after all.

  "We can't put off leaving much longer," Miranda said. "It's too dangerous for your mom."

  "Where will we go?" Phillips asked, though he knew the answer.

  "Dee's got to be the only one who can help her. So I have to go to my 'new and improved' father and ask him."

  What if Dee wouldn't or couldn't help? And if he did, what would be his price?

  "I don't want you to. I'll go." There, he'd said it. For all the good it would do.

  Miranda didn't respond right away, instead stashing the gun inside her bag and folding over the flap. She stood and paced along a bookshelf at the other end of the library from the desk.

  "Phillips," she said, "I know this will be hard for you. You want to be my knight in... Well, we don't have any armor and that's part of the problem. We're way overmatched. I'm dealing with a curse hundreds of years old that makes this place loathe me and me loathe this place, and that makes you my enemy, sworn to put the island first."

  "I'm not your enemy. I never could be."

  At the end of the bookshelf, she turned to face him. The wide spines of reference works, dictionaries and encyclopedias, framed her on either side. None contained the answers they needed.

  She said, "I have to go with you and you'll use me. You'll use me to bargain for your mother's life. You know why?"

  He didn't want to hear anymore. "I won't."

  "Because the part of me that shot that gun at your mother, that part enjoyed it."

  Phillips rose from the desk. The voices buzzed, and he did his best not to listen. When he reached her, he pulled her toward him.

  Their bodies touched, barely, the pressure slight. Pulling, repelling.

  The raised voices in Phillips' head reminded him they weren't alone. That he was never alone. The jumble of words swallowed his own thoughts, leaving his mother's chalkpainted features.

  He released Miranda. "You'll come then."

  "I have to." Miranda looked away. Her eyes traveled down the shelves of reference books, down to…

  He was confused when she bent, her hand exploring a gap between the bookshelf and the wall. She pulled on what appeared to be a plastic tarp. When Phillips saw the zipper, he understood what she'd found. She dropped the plastic as she realised it too.

  "Is that a body bag?" she asked.

  The hatch above them flipped open, light from the living room above brightening the space. She kicked at the body bag, trying to get it stuffed back into the corner.

  Phillips shifted to hide her motion from Roswell, who plunked down the steps. Bone was behind him, his face pasty instead of pink.

  "I found your girlfriend's father much more polite, Phillips," Roswell said. He walked closer to Phillips and peered around his shoulder at Miranda. "Of course, he was deceased."

Funny that Miranda wore the stupid snake when Roswell turned out to be one.

  Sara's body lay across hers and Phillips' laps in the backseat of Roswell's hunter green Volvo, Bone riding shotgun. Heading across the island had been their next move, but not like this. Not as prisoners.

  Thick cords of rope, the kind used by fishermen in Wanchese, chafed Miranda's wrists. Bone had pretended to take pleasure in binding her. His shaking hands gave him away. He was wigged, but still being daddy's boy. Once he finished, she quickly determined that the restraints were too tight for her to loosen by working at them. These ropes were made to withstand the pressure of the Sound and the ocean, of high winds. She'd used them to secure enough sails on the faux ship at the theater to know all she'd accomplish would be tearing her skin.

  "Doc," Phillips said, raising his bound wrists, "why are you doing this?"

  "After the time we've spent together, you don't have a guess? You know this is my research, my life's work." Roswell seemed amused. "You've always been such a sharp boy, surely you can make a guess."

  Bone shifted in his seat when his father complimented Phillips. Miranda was curious whether Phillips had been anywhere near the mark about Bone liking her – doubtful given the overkill on the rope, but they needed every edge they could get.