The Master Of Misrule Part 7

Arthur taught Latin and history at a private girls' school. He wasn't bad-looking, except for his small, pale eyes and prissy mouth, but he had the air of someone much older than his forty-something years. Two days after meeting Helen, he invited her to a piano recital. It was after that evening that Arthur sent the thank-you card. And it seemed that it was only a few weeks later that Helen, starry-eyed as a schoolgirl, announced that they were going to get married.

Even before they'd got to the registry office, Arthur had organized the sale of Helen's cottage, and she and Blaine moved into his respectably ugly place on the other side of town. Blaine had to change schools as well.

Meanwhile, Helen stopped giving piano lessons. Arthur said that she wasn't good at teaching, that it made her tired and tense, and she agreed with him. Because she had always been nervous of things like bank accounts and insurance and bills, he took care of this, giving her a small allowance every week.

They never went out or invited people round. Blaine's mother only seemed properly aware of him when she got in a muddle with her household ch.o.r.es. Then she would cry and beg for help, but guiltily, because Arthur had told her Blaine was not allowed to interfere. If Blaine did, or if Arthur was particularly displeased with him, then Arthur would hit him.

It was generally in places that didn't show, and if Helen noticed the marks, Blaine would shrug and say he'd been in a fight. Boys will be boys, Arthur would say, smiling his small, prim smile across the table.

Blaine tried not to react, but as time went on, the hatred that pulsed inside him grew too big and b.l.o.o.d.y to control. He began staying out late to avoid going home. In a run-down seaside town, and a school full of wrong crowds, there was plenty of opportunity for trouble. He got suspended from school, and had some run-ins with the police.

Arthur was very forgiving of Helen. Her son's criminality wasn't necessarily her fault, he told her. Some boys just went bad. Helen might shake her head a little but she wouldn't deny it.

As time went on, Blaine saw that he had two options: persuade Helen to leave Arthur, or force Arthur to treat both of them better. Either way, he needed some kind of leverage. Blaine would try and keep a record of when Arthur hit him. But he also needed something that couldn't be explained away by a household mishap or the rough-and-tumble of school.

Arthur controlled the purse strings as tightly as everything else, but what if there was more to this than miserliness? Blaine had begun to wonder about the money from the sale of Helen's cottage, and what had happened to the savings his grandmother had left him.

And so one evening, after Arthur had left for a PTA meeting and Helen had taken some sleeping pills and gone to bed, Blaine used his newfound criminal skills to pick the lock on his stepfather's study.

He started with the filing cabinet, pulling out papers at random. He was just about to replace a file of insurance forms when his eye was caught by something colorful tucked into a plastic wallet at the back. It was a card with an ill.u.s.tration of a dancing figure encircled by a snake on one side and writing on the reverse: It bore a little icon of a four-spoked wheel.

Blaine didn't quite know why the card seemed so sinister, but its careful placement in the insurance folder suggested it was important. He flipped rapidly through the remaining files in the drawer and found a leather notebook concealed within a file of old payslips. It opened onto a page of devil drawings and pentagrams.

"Well, well," came a voice from the door. "So it's breaking and entering now. You're turning into quite the career criminal."

Arthur had returned early. His entrance had been deliberately quiet, for Blaine had not heard the front door close and Arthur hadn't switched on the light in the hallway.

"What's this?" Blaine demanded, holding out the book and the card.

"Nothing that concerns you."

"It does if it's some kind of Satanist c.r.a.p. Are you dragging my mum into a cult, along with everything else?"

"You have no right to be in here. Give me that card."

"Not till you tell me what it's about." Blaine was almost sixteen now; for the first time, he realized he was bigger and stronger than his stepfather.

Arthur smiled contemptuously. "You couldn't possibly begin to understand. This is your last warning. Give it up."

And he took out a knife.

Instantly, everything was catapulted out of place. Arthur's blade was long and serrated, and Blaine recognized it from the kitchen drawer, but it was nonetheless absurd, a theatrical prop.

"What the h.e.l.l are you doing?" he managed to ask.

"Protecting my home." Arthur's tone was as quiet and reasonable as ever, though there was sweat on his brow.

"It's my home, too. Jesus-you're deranged. You-"

But Arthur was advancing across the room, with the knife held before him. "Give me the card."

Blaine swore, and grasped it tighter.

Then Arthur slashed at his bare arm, the one that was holding the book and card against his chest. Blood ran, shockingly warm and bright, all along Blaine's arm and into his hand, so that his fingers were slippery with it. He heard the thump as the book hit the floor.

The next moment Arthur was on him, clutching for the card, clammy and panting. Blaine threw his weight against Arthur, slamming him into the wall, and made for the door.

Before he could reach it, Arthur lunged at him again, slashing with the knife. Blaine tripped over himself and stumbled to the floor, but he grabbed at Arthur's legs and brought him crashing down with him. The knife fell, too, was scrabbled for by Arthur, s.n.a.t.c.hed away by Blaine and, between the two of them, kicked across the room. Blaine hardly knew why he was so desperate not to give the card up, but as Arthur clawed savagely at his hand, he forgot about trying to regain the knife or making his escape. Keeping the card from Arthur became all that mattered.

There was a slow ripping sound. Arthur gave a strangled cry. He had the card, but Blaine had torn off the top left corner. This time, it was Arthur's body that slackened in shock.

Blaine saw that he had the advantage now. Hot with hate, he drove his fist into Arthur's face, and when the prissy mouth gave a grunt of pain, a flash of joy sparked through him. As Arthur flailed and writhed beneath him, Blaine gripped him by his hair and smashed his head against the side of the filing cabinet.

Something plucked at his shirt. He twitched his shoulders impatiently. Then he heard his name.

Helen was standing over them, white-faced and making hiccupping little screams. Blaine found he couldn't speak. He and Arthur were both spattered in blood-Blaine's blood, mostly-and he knew his face was still suffused with the violence he'd inflicted.

He got up and released Arthur; there was nothing else he could do. For a few moments Arthur lay where he was, groaning, before he dragged himself up by the corner of the desk, and stayed huddled there in a defensive crouch.

"You see now, don't you, Helen?" he choked out. "You see what your son has done to me."

Helen had her hands crammed against her mouth. A low moan forced its way through them.

"Yes," said Arthur. He dabbed at the blood on his face, and when he spoke again, his voice was cracked but calm. "He broke into my room. He lay in wait for me with that knife. You saw him attack me with your own eyes. He is a monster, Helen."

Blaine swayed on his feet. He looked at Helen to try and get past the glaze of sleep and pills and horror in her eyes. "Mum," he said. "Please ..."

But Helen shrank from him, and screwed her eyes tight shut. So he limped past her into the hall, pausing only to pick up the fallen notebook. He left the house and didn't look back.

Because he couldn't think of anywhere else to go, Blaine made his way to their old neighborhood and their old neighbor: Liz the nurse.

"I'm B-Blaine," he stammered out. "Helen's son? We used to live round here." Dizziness swilled through his head. "There was a-my stepfather tried-I couldn't ... I didn't know what to do...."

Once she'd got over her initial shock, Liz said she was taking him to the hospital. At that point he tried to leave, saying that he couldn't get anyone official involved, that the doctors would call the police, and his stepfather, and then- In the end, his desperation must have persuaded her, for she made a phone call and another woman arrived-a doctor, he supposed-who st.i.tched up his arm and gave him a shot of something, shaking her head and tutting all the while.

From there on, everything mercifully dissolved into blackness.

The next afternoon, Liz took Blaine to the police station and waited while he made a statement about the fight in the study. For some reason, though, he couldn't quite bring himself to show them the torn piece of card in his pocket. The day after that, Sat.u.r.day, Liz went to see Helen. She was away for a long time, and when she came back, her face was grim. "Your stepfather's gone," she told him. "Apparently, the police came round yesterday evening. Asked some questions, took a look round Arthur's study. They wanted to know about your grandmother's trust fund, too. He got very upset, Helen said. Afterward he tore off in the car."

Blaine didn't read too much into this. Arthur hadn't even been gone twenty-four hours.

"How's Mum? Does she want to see me?"

"I'm sorry." Liz couldn't quite meet his eye. "She says ... well, she says that she's afraid of you, Blaine."

She had brought back a bag of his things. She told him a woman from social services would be visiting, but that he'd be staying with her for "the meantime." Neither of them wanted to look too closely at what that meant.

Later, Blaine went to Arthur's house. The blinds were drawn and the place looked lifeless; Helen must have shut herself away in the bedroom. He didn't want her to see him lurking and get scared, so he stayed in the bus shelter on the other side of the street. He had no plans. He just wanted to be close by.

He got out Arthur's notebook to have another look at the drawing of the card he'd found, and the reference to TEMPLE HSE. MERCURY SQ., the address he remembered from the back of the invitation. The more he stared at it, the more mysterious it seemed.

A dark car purred along the road and pulled in a little way down from the bus stop. A man got out and walked up to Arthur's front door. He rang the bell repeatedly, hung about on the doorstep for a while and peered into the ground-floor windows.

Blaine watched this with some interest. Arthur didn't have many visitors; Helen, none. The man had noticed him watching, and came over to where Blaine was sitting. "I'm after Arthur Wh-white," he said. "I don't suppose you know him?"

The man wore an expensive-looking coat and had a hooked, handsome face, with silvering hair. Blaine wondered if he had something to do with the school where Arthur taught-a governor, perhaps.

"Arthur White? Sure I know him. I know he's a vicious maniac and the police are after him."

The man stiffened. "P-police?"

"Yeah. They were around here yesterday. Looks like he's given them the slip."

"And where do you think he could have s-slipped to?" he asked softly.

"Rumor has it he's joined a cult."

The man looked down at Blaine's lap and the open notebook. His eyes lingered on the sketch of the card. "How interesting." He gave a half smile. "You've been most h-helpful. Thank you." Then he got into the car and drove away.

At the end of the week, there was still no sign of Arthur. Blaine went to see his mother, with Liz there to supervise. Helen's face was mottled with tears and tiredness, and her nails were gnawed down to the quick. When Blaine came in, she flinched away and sat crouched in the corner of the sofa, thin arms wrapped around her body, as she rocked and wept.

"No, no, I mustn't see you. He wouldn't like it. He told me, he warned me, he'd leave if we weren't good enough. You pushed him to the edge and now you've driven him away. All he ever wanted to do was take care of us, and what will happen to us now? I can't bear it, oh-"

Liz walked Blaine to the door. "She'll come round," she said wearily. "But I'm getting the doctor to visit later. It may be that your mother needs to be looked after ... professionally, for a while."

Blaine nodded dumbly. He wished he had never gone into the study, never found the card.

And yet he carried his torn corner with him at all times, as if for luck. The top of the dancer's head was visible above the tear, and there was part of the first line of writing on the back: Following his visit to Helen, however, Blaine wanted to forget about Arthur and everything else. He went to walk on the seafront.

Like most of the town, the promenade's row of seedy bed-and-breakfasts and discount shops had seen better days. The amus.e.m.e.nt arcade that lined the rusting Victorian pier was closed at this time on a Sunday. Nonetheless, a group of people were sitting around one of the plastic picnic tables outside the entrance. They looked exotically out of place.

There was a blonde in a sharp white suit and sungla.s.ses, even though it was a dour winter's afternoon. She was seated opposite an older, darkly glamorous woman in an evening gown. A young man lounged beside her, fashionably disheveled. He had a sleepy smile and tousled hair. The fourth was a black man, dressed as if for a business meeting, grizzled and stern.

As Blaine drew closer, he noticed two things. One, that the group appeared to be playing a card game of some sort, and two, that although they were talking among themselves, the sound was small and blurred, as if he was listening to something far away. The chill wind that had begun to whip off the sea didn't ruffle their clothes or hair, let alone set them shivering.

Out of some instinct, Blaine felt in his back pocket. As he did so, the black man rose to his feet and put out his hand.

"I believe you have something belonging to our Game."

His voice was heavy as granite. The other three didn't even look up. Without quite knowing why, Blaine proffered his bloodstained piece of card.

"I want to find the man who's got the rest of this card," he said.

"He has joined the Game as a Knight of Wands, and become lost in the Arcanum."

"Arc-what?"

"The place where our Game is played."

"Will he come back?"

"He could. He has everything to play for."

"Then I've got to go find him."

Below them, the gray sea sucked and mumbled on the gray stones. A seagull cawed. But for Blaine, everything except the man in front of him had faded into the distance.

The man looked at him carefully. "You have brought only a sc.r.a.p of card. You cannot become a knight of our courts or compete for our prizes.

"However, your actions have altered the State of Play. You are responsible for this Knight of Wands joining the Game, and because your intervention was by accident, we have no choice but to let you into the Arcanum. Your role in the Game will be that of a chancer. Some call it the Fool."

He picked up a new card from the table and gave it to Blaine. This one showed a figure dressed in motley-colored rags, poised at the brink of a precipice. The lettering on the back was the same as on Arthur's.

"Temple House? Where's that?"

"There are many cities with a quiet square, an ancient house, a door that is just ajar. All players in the Game of Triumphs will find their way to it."

Blaine tightened his grip around the gilt edge of the card. His hand was shaking slightly. "And ... and who are you?"

"I am Ahab, king of the Court of Wands. And these are the Game's other masters: Alastor, King of Swords; Odile, Queen of Cups; and Lucrezia, Queen of Pentacles."

At this, the other three looked up at him and smiled. The wound on his arm flared. Blaine was suddenly afraid, and turned to go. When he looked back from the end of the street, the four cardplayers had gone.

Arthur White became the subject of an official missing-person inquiry. The police traced his credit card to a petrol station in central London, but that was three days after his disappearance, and there had been nothing since.

Blaine took the train to London at the end of the week. Someone from school had a brother living in Hammersmith, and Blaine arranged to stay on his sofa for the first few nights. After that, who knew? Ever since meeting the King of Wands, nothing felt real to him except his pursuit of Arthur. He did not really question what the game was, or what would become of him when he entered it.

He had slipped away without saying goodbye to Liz, to spare her having to try and persuade him not to leave. Instead, he left her a thank-you note, with a vague story about trying to track down his father. He left a letter for Helen, too, for when she got out of the clinic where she was "resting."

And so Blaine went to London and found his way to Temple House, Mercury Square, and all the strangeness of the Arcanum. But nearly a year later, he had found no trace of Arthur White.

In altum tollor, Nimis exaltatus; Descendo minoratus, Funditus mortificatus!

I am raised on high, Exalted too much; I descend diminished, Utterly destroyed!

In the warm peace of the Seatons' bas.e.m.e.nt, the drum of the dryer spun slowly round. Blaine was staring at a sketch of Fortune's Wheel. The lines of poetry written at its side thrummed through his head, as if in time to the machine's cycle. He had soon realized that Arthur's research contained only red herrings and dead ends. Yet he kept the notebook with him anyway, as a kind of talisman.

Occasionally, Blaine would call Liz and tell her lies about what he was doing and where he was staying, but his mother rarely came to the phone. In Arthur's absence she had set herself the task of proving to him that she was everything he wanted her to be. Part of her penance was exiling her son.

And this was Blaine's fear: that Arthur would find a way to come back, triumphantly and unbeatably, having escaped the Arcanum and won some great prize in the Game. Blaine must find him first. Not to destroy him-not at first. No, Blaine wanted to drag Arthur back to expose him, and make him face what he'd done. Arthur must be forced to let Helen see who the true monster was.

Blaine understood that by confronting Arthur with the notebook and card, and then involving the police, he had forced his stepfather to flee into the Arcanum. Such a cautious, canny man would never otherwise have taken the risk. Blaine was responsible, as Ahab had said, for making Arthur a knight and himself a chancer.

Now the reign of Ahab, King of Wands, was over. The nature of the Game had changed. But whatever it took to defeat Misrule, Blaine would do it, so he could pursue Arthur White across every square on the Arcanum's board.

THE NEXT MORNING WAS FINE and bright. A great day to save the world, as Toby remarked when he met Cat by the steps of Temple House.

Cat did not respond. She did not want to be in this dismal, ruined place. She did not want to hear more of the High Priest's threats of doom. Her fears were evenly split between what was waiting for them in the Arcanum and whether Bel could be trusted to keep away from the scratchcards.