This Eternity of Masks and Shadows

by Karsten Knight

  The bang echoed through the cavern, so loud the vibrations felt like they penetrated Cairn’s bones. The python unspooled itself and dropped to the ground. Its long yellow body slithered off, disappearing into a patch of barley.

  Janet collapsed to her knees and gasped for breath. Between the strangulation and the gunshot, she had jettisoned headlong out of her trance. Back in reality, her frantic, dilated eyes searched the garden for some understanding.

  Before the hyperventilating assistant could spot the doctor’s corpse in the weeds, Cairn knelt in front of her, blocking the body from view. Once Janet realized her employer was dead, it would be much harder to get her to focus.

  “I need you to tell me what you just saw,” Cairn insisted, “right now, before you forget. Where do you think you’ve been for the last ten minutes?” Any information might give Cairn a better sense of what her mother had seen that day in September.

  Janet’s breathing gradually calmed, and for a moment, Cairn thought they might get a lucid answer out of her.

  But then she abruptly seized Cairn by the lapel. “Please, make it stop!” Janet moaned as she began to violently shake. Cairn recoiled as the woman’s spittle flew onto her face, but Janet held on tightly as she screamed, “Make the chanting stop!”

  By the time backup arrived at Dr. Sibelius’s lab, the assistant was still in hysterics, clutching her ears and moaning as if the nightmare had spilled right into reality.

  In a way, it had.

  Worst of all, Nook’s supervising captain showed up unexpectedly and blew a gasket when his detective couldn’t explain why Cairn, a civilian, had accompanied him to question a suspect.

  Nook had kept his gun and badge for now, but Cairn got the sense his career was one small error away from termination.

  Nook and Cairn drove in chilly silence as he navigated the country roads leading back to the highway. When they finally reached the on-ramp, Nook cruised right past it. Cairn pointed back at the sign. “Hey, we just passed the Pike.”

  Nook ignored her. “Do you have a driver’s license?” he asked instead, his sullen eyes fixed on the road’s centerline.

  ‘Yes.”

  He patted the gearshift. “And did you ever learn to drive stick?”

  “Yes, Mom taught me, but—”

  With a sudden twist of the wheel, Nook threw the Challenger into a hairpin turn. The tires screeched and Cairn was flattened against the window as they jumped a low curb and into the parking lot of a rundown bar. Nook brought the car to a hard stop in front of a hand-painted sign that read “The Wayward Squirrel.”

  He powered off the car. “You sit here,” he commanded. “I will be out in exactly thirty minutes, and then you will drive us back to Boston.”

  “You can’t be serious,” Cairn protested. “If you’re going to make me your designated driver, can I at least listen to the radio while you’re off getting hammered?”

  But Nook had already snatched the keys from the ignition and exited the vehicle. Even as Cairn laid on the horn, he didn’t so much as glance back at her as he stepped into the bar and let the door slam behind him.

  Cairn waited a whole two minutes, sitting in silence and feeling the forest around the parking lot close in around her. “Forget this,” she growled finally. She exited the car and crossed the dusty parking lot in a few angry strides.

  The inside of the Wayward Squirrel was somehow even dingier than its exterior. A handful of jaundiced light bulbs gave the windowless room a dim, tangerine glow—it might as well have been midnight inside. A few locals played billiards, while another fussed with a jukebox that piped out John Denver’s “Aspenglow.” The bearded bartender eyed her with curiosity before he resumed emptying a dishwasher full of pint glasses.

  Nook sat alone at the bar, gaze fixed on the Bruins game unfolding on the lone television. Two empty shot glasses stood in front of him like miniature tombstones, and he clutched a half-empty Budweiser in his good hand.

  As Cairn slipped into the stool beside Nook, she expected him to yell at her to get back in the car. Instead, as mellow as she’d ever seen him, he asked, “You hungry? Can’t imagine the cuisine here is going to win ‘Top Chef,’ but they’ve got a microwave.”

  Cairn tapped her lip thoughtfully. “Yeah, how about an order of chicken fingers with a side of what the fuck is your problem?”

  Nook blinked at her, looking tired. Then he beckoned the bartender over. “She’ll have a Coca Cola. And I’ll have another of these.” He chugged the last of his beer.

  Cairn glowered at Nook’s profile until he sighed. “I’m just going to rip off the Band-Aid, Cairn: this is the end of the road for our little ‘job shadowing program,’ or whatever the hell Themis wants to call this arrangement.”

  “What? Why?” Cairn couldn’t help how shrill her voice came out. “Look, I know I froze back at the lab when the shit hit the fan but—”

  Nook slammed his prosthetic hand on the countertop loud enough to draw glances from the bar’s other patrons. “That is how you should have reacted!” He lowered his voice. “You’re an eighteen-year-old girl, not a cop, and you just had to watch a man burn his face off with acid. We’re lucky he didn’t burn your face off.”

  Cairn quivered in her seat. “I’m an adult now. I can handle myself. And today is proof that we’re getting close to the truth. Dr. Sibelius had the same tranced look that my mom did before she killed herself. You can’t deprive me of the opportunity to find out what really happened to her.”

  “I can if it keeps you alive.” He shook his head. “I’m sorry, kid. Themis should never have asked this of me.”

  Cairn pushed away the soda that had just arrived. A hollow feeling gnawed at her stomach. “Then why did you even agree in the first place? What is this debt that you owe Themis, anyway?”

  Once again, Nook surprised her by answering, and the next seven words almost made her wish she’d never asked.

  “Themis helped me find my daughter’s killer.”

  “Oh, Nook.” Cairn put a hand on his shoulder. “I’m so sorry.”

  Nook pulled the wallet from his jeans and extracted a ragged photo of a young, smiling Inuit girl, maybe thirteen or fourteen years old. It was one of those school portraits with the cheesy laser backgrounds. The name at the bottom read Elisa Bedard. The girl had Nook’s eyes and the same slight gap between her two front teeth. She was beautiful.

  “Five years ago,” Nook began, “after those attacks in Florida and California, I was asked to launch a new task force on Deity Affairs. One of the first investigations I opened was to track down Nemesis, the Greek goddess of vengeance—a mob enforcer who had evaded the FBI and Interpol for years. Our intel showed that she kept a penthouse in Charlestown.” He took a long swig of his beer. “I guess Nemesis caught wind that I was looking for her. One day, after I picked Elisa up from school, we came home and Nemesis was waiting in ambush for us. Next thing I know, my arm was caught in a bear trap, and I thought it was the most excruciating pain I’d never known. I was wrong.”

  Nook disengaged his prosthesis and lay it on the bar top. Cairn had mistakenly assumed that Nook had been born an amputee. Now, she could see the skin between his elbow and the site of the amputation had suffered severe trauma. White scar lines crisscrossed his flesh in a grotesque fractal pattern.

  “Nemesis put a knife to Elisa’s throat,” Nook continued. “She said if I could gnaw my way out of the trap in under a minute, she would spare my daughter. So I turned into my bear form and started chewing.” He rolled down his sleeve. “I didn’t finish in time. I was only ten feet from Elisa and I couldn’t even hold her as she died.”

  Cairn was crying now. She felt like she might have to rush to the bar’s filthy bathroom to vomit.

  “Back then, Themis still had a fraction of her vision left,” Nook said. “She sacrificed the rest to use her abilities and help me locate Nemesis, who had escaped to the island of Crete. I hope she enjoyed it there, because it’s now her permanent resting
place, at least until the next time she’s reincarnated.” He spread his hands. “Themis is blind and mostly powerless today because of me. So now you know why I had to say yes when she ordered me to take you on. But my daughter would be your age today if she were still alive, and I couldn’t live with myself if something happened to you under my watch.”

  They lapsed into silence after that—what could Cairn say in the wake of such a horrific story? She’d heard enough “I’m sorry for your loss” after her mother died to know that no words offered any real solace.

  After Nook finished his beer, Cairn drove them back to Boston, where she dropped him off at his apartment. He insisted that she keep the Challenger for the night, and he’d pick it up in the morning.

  As Nook tried to exit the car, Cairn leaned across him and held the door shut. “You don’t get to leave until I say what I need to say.”

  His eyes were the chasms of a man who had lost everything.

  “Ever since I was little,” Cairn began, “my mom would tell me myths as bedtime stories. Nanook was one of my favorites. He was a fair and valorous god, who decided who was pure of spirit, who was worthy enough to succeed in the hunt for polar bear meat.” She let that sink in. “Cutting me off when we’re this close to finding out what happened to my mom? That’s not a fair hunt.”

  “I’m sorry to disappoint you,” Nook slurred. “The Nanook from your mother’s stories isn’t real. There’s a reason they call them myths.”

  “Every myth has a fragment of truth,” Cairn said. “Your very existence right here, right now, is proof of that. This is your chance to be the Nanook I was promised.”

  Nook sighed. “Here’s the only truth I know: gods like me and your mother aren’t divine or superior to anyone else. We’re as fallible as any mortal—the only difference is that we have a few extra tools to fuck up our lives and an eternity of centuries afterward to regret it.” He popped open the car door. “Keep putting us on pedestals, kid, and you are destined for disappointment.”

  With that, Nook lumbered out of the car. She watched him fumble with his house keys, dropping them twice before he got into his apartment.

  As Cairn drove off, her hands tightened around the steering wheel. At the end of the day, it didn’t matter if Nook wanted to cut her out of the investigation.

  She wouldn’t stop until she found her mother’s killer.

  And when she did, the bastard would suffer a fate far worse than any myth.

  Sable Noir, Part III: Petrified

  Nineteen Years Earlier

  This time they stuck to the trees. Tane took the lead, using his psychic connection to the jungle to track where Aether had trampled through the brush. The girl had amazing endurance to have outpaced them for so long.

  Or a real determination to get away.

  Sedna was on edge—they all were. The mudslide had caught them off-guard, and who knew what other deathtraps awaited them further up the volcano. A swarm of bees? A raging wildfire? The vegetation around them was suffocatingly dense, and every time Sedna brushed aside a frond, she expected to get a spear through the face.

  Mami Wata was out there somewhere, and she wasn’t happy that they were traipsing around the island uninvited.

  The afternoon heat was oppressive, but Sedna knew that nightfall would leave them even more defenseless than they already were, and worse, it would be harder to track Aether without ambient light.

  As dusk approached, the jungle abruptly gave way to a relatively flat, open grove of coconut trees. The canopy thinned out enough that she could see the sun languishing on the western horizon, and to the north, the smoking caldera of Sable Noir's volcano.

  Sedna knew she should feel grateful for a reprieve from the overgrown, uneven terrain. But as they moved deeper into the grove, something felt off, a subtle shift in the light that Sedna couldn’t quite put her finger on.

  “What the fuck is wrong with these trees?” Ra asked from the rear.

  Sedna examined the tree nearest her. Instead of a healthy brown, the trunk was a mottled mix of gray and teal with veins of rust-colored minerals threading through it. She reached out and ran her fingers over it.

  The coconut tree had turned to stone.

  The fronds above had suffered a similar fate, forever entombed in sculpture form.

  “Petrification,” Dr. Sibelius explained. It was the first time he’d spoken since Aether disappeared. “This plateau was probably at one point buried in volcanic ash. Over time, the organic matter in the trees was slowly replaced with silicates, iron, manganese, and copper, perfectly preserving it in quartz, right down to its cellular structure. But this is unnatural—I’ve never seen a petrified forest that was still standing.”

  As they moved deeper, even the grass died. Tane looked visibly uncomfortable as they distanced themselves from the living plant life of the forest. But Nagual had picked up the trail of Aether’s scent, so they followed him unquestioningly through the petrified grove.

  Sedna smelled the tarpit before she saw it, asphyxiating fumes like the odor of a freshly paved road. The pit stretched across their path, a ten-meter-wide charcoal smile cut into the earth. Bubbles slowly popped on its surface as the geothermal heat boiled it from below. The intense warmth washed over Sedna and she briefly entertained a nightmare of what it would be like to drown in it, to try to breathe, only to have the viscous black ooze rush down her throat.

  “Anyone need a hot bath?” Nagual asked. He raised his arms and sniffed his pits. “I sure do.”

  Sedna turned to Tane. “Could you insta-grow us some plants that could form a bridge over this muck?”

  Tane wiped the sweat from his forehead. “The soil here isn’t exactly vegetation-friendly, and I doubt I could plant roots deep enough to support our weight. I’d rather not risk any of us boiling alive. We’ll have to go around it.”

  “Aether didn’t go around.” Njörun crouched at the edge of the pit. While her abilities were mostly limited to the dream realm, the goddess was also an empath. She could sense remnants of strong emotional states the same way Nagual could follow a scent. “It’s strange though,” she whispered. “She didn’t feel afraid. She felt …” Her gaze landed on the fidgety doctor, who was fumbling to unscrew the cap on his canteen. “… liberated.”

  A deep, unfamiliar voice echoed through the grove. “Who dares invade the holy sanctum of Mami Wata?”

  They all turned toward the line of petrified trees behind them. A black man in a top hat and dapper tailcoat stepped from the shadows of a stony palm. He had a white skull painted on his face and a cigar between his fingers. “Who dares wake Mami Wata from her slumber?” he asked in a Creole accent.

  Nagual cleared his throat. “Well, old sport, if you point us in the direction of the Great Gatsby’s party, we’ll merrily be on our way.”

  The newcomer chuckled and tapped the ash from his cigar onto the ground. “Is this funny man your spokesperson?”

  Ra seemed to take it as a personal affront that anyone else might be mistaken as their leader. He stepped forward. “Who are you and where is the sea witch?”

  “Ah, I see you have both a jester and a fool,” the man replied. “I am Baron Samedi, protector of Mami Wata.”

  Tane looked to Sedna to see if she recognized the name from her mental encyclopedia of mythology. “He’s a loa, a spirit of Haitian Vodou,” she explained quietly. “He’s the patron of resurrection.”

  “And black magic!” Baron Samedi added. But this voice belonged to a second identical man who’d emerged from behind another tree—same suit, same hat, same painted face.

  “So I give you two choices,” a third doppelgänger said, stepping into the clearing. “Hurry back the way you came and board your boat within the hour …”

  “… or die now and Sable Noir shall be your final resting place,” a fourth finished.

  Before long, there were ten clones of Baron Samedi fanned out around the grove, weaving in and out of the trees until they’d lost track of t
he original. The Pantheon had settled into defensive stances, so Sedna tried one last time to be the voice of reason. She stepped forward and held up her hands. “Baron, no one here wants bloodshed. But I’m sure you’ve seen the shipwrecks. Mami Wata is killing innocent people, whether she intends to or not.”

  Another Baron shrugged and took a drink from a glass of rum, looking unmoved. “Mami Wata is the all-powerful mother. It is her divine prerogative to decide who lives and who dies.”

  “We just want to talk to her,” Sedna pleaded.

  The Baron nearest them squinted at her as if this idea were completely preposterous. “Then you are the biggest fool of them all.”

  “Enough.” Ra ignited his hands. “You better hope your suits are flame retardant.”

  “So many words, and all of it hot air.” Baron ran two fingers over his lips in a zipping motion. “A shame fire requires oxygen.”

  Ra dropped to his knees. He frantically clawed at his face with his fiery fingers.

  When he turned to Sedna, his mouth had disappeared, now just a uniform swath of flesh between his cheeks. His nostrils had sealed closed, too, and then his eyelids. As the fire on his hands flickered out, he blindly threw one last chance fireball—in the wrong direction. It rocketed between Sedna and Tane and ignited the tarpit behind them. In seconds, the surface of the pit had become a raging inferno.

  Njörun dove to Ra’s side to help him, but there wasn’t much she could do. He writhed around on the ground, struggling for air.

  “Brujo!” Nagual growled. He stripped off his shirt and dropped to all fours, quickly assuming his largest jaguar shape. He stalked slowly toward the Barons, a low growl emanating from his throat.

  “Bad kitty.” Baron made another flourish with his hands.

  Mid-roar, the teeth abruptly fell out of Nagual’s open mouth. They dropped harmlessly to the ground. His claws followed.

  Then, against his will, his body began to contract. In seconds, only a jaguar kitten remained, rolling harmlessly around in the ashes.