The Master of Misrule (12 page)

Mostly, though, Blaine had been lucky. He looked older than he was: big enough and tough enough to more or less be left alone.

As he moved his clean clothes to the tumble dryer and watched them slump round and round in the hot air, he felt some of the tension leave his shoulders. You couldn’t cadge for money or get odd jobs—packing up market stalls, washing dishes—if you stank or turned up in rags. Thinking of this, he decided that he’d probably been too quick to turn down Flora’s offer of clothes.

He sat down against the wall and reached for his bag. There was a leather notebook concealed inside the lining. Its cover was stained and worn. Though he had first read it with confusion and loathing, its pages had become so well known to him that their familiarity was almost comforting.

The first page was a rough sketch of the card known to Blaine as the Triumph of Eternity. It was this card that gave a knight admittance to the Game. A dancing figure hovered above the earth, encircled by a serpent biting its own tail. The four corners of the drawing each contained a little wheel with a smudgy face in its center. Underneath the picture, someone had written in a neat, cramped hand,
Dancer = hermaphrodite. Is this significant? NB Vision of the Wheels. Ezekiel 10
. At the bottom of the page, written larger for emphasis, was
TEMPLE HSE. MERCURY SQ
.

The rest of the book was filled with more jottings and diagrams. Images of Death, the Devil and the Tower featured heavily, interspersed with notes on the ancient Egyptian
Book of the Dead
and the black magic practices of an occult society called the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

Blaine traced one of the bloodstains on the book’s cover. He looked without really seeing at the tight, neat script inside, and thought of the first time he’d seen this handwriting.

My dear Helen
, the card on the mantelpiece had read,
I hope you don’t mind me writing to thank you for such a delightful evening
.… Even as a small boy, Blaine had known that Helen wasn’t like other mothers. She laughed louder than most people and cried more, too. As for other people’s fathers, that was something Blaine didn’t really think about. His own had left when he was a baby, or perhaps even before he was born. Blaine’s grandmother looked after them both. Helen, she said, was too easily hurt by the world.

The trouble came when Blaine turned twelve, and his grandmother died. After the funeral, Helen shut herself in her bedroom for weeks. She didn’t dress or wash and barely seemed to eat. Meanwhile, Blaine did his best to look after the house and do the shopping and cleaning, as his grandmother had taught him to.

After a while, Helen got better. She went back to giving piano lessons in their tiny sitting room and seemed to enjoy it. She started seeing friends again, too. Then one of their neighbors, Liz the nurse, invited Helen to a party. It was there that Helen met Arthur White.

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 chores. 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 bloody 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
illustration 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 crap. 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 hell 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, snatched 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 stitched 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, Saturday, 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.