This Eternity of Masks and Shadows

by Karsten Knight

  “Enough,” Drumm growled from somewhere behind Aries. “Boss wants him alive … for now.”

  Grudgingly, she relented and the two mercenaries hauled Jack up by his shoulders. He bellowed as his weight came down on his mangled knee. Next thing he knew, he was tossed like a dishrag into the back of a van. The Boston night disappeared behind the sliding door.

  The Seaport

  It wasn’t that Jack didn’t fight back. But with his injured leg struggling to support his weight and his knife lost in the Fenway marsh, he proved a less than formidable opponent as Drumm and Aries forcibly removed him from the van. With each of them securing one of his elbows, they carried him down the dimly lit alley.

  A second vehicle arrived behind the brick building—it was Pearce, whose Rhodesian ridgebacks barked feverishly in the cab of his pickup, smelling that their prey was near. Pearce’s comb-over glistened with sweat, which he wiped off with two fingers and flicked contemptuously at Jack’s face. Then he cast open the building’s two massive cellar doors and Jack’s captors dragged him down into a dank basement.

  Aries slammed him onto a wooden table, holding him down while Drumm used a length of rope to tie him in place. Jack tried to wriggle free, but the taut cords had him pinned at the shoulders. He hadn’t been sure where they were taking him while he was in the windowless van, but between the briny smell of the harbor and the muffled melody of a big band orchestra playing one story above them, he now realized exactly where he was.

  He was beneath the Nightingale.

  On the other side of the basement, the elevator droned an ominous “ding” and the doors parted.

  Horace Nox had arrived.

  Horror-struck, Jack picked his aching head as far off the table as he could to get a good look at the man. Jack had worked at the Nightingale for over a month before he’d even met Nox, at first only observing the gangster from afar as he walked around the nightclub like a god amongst men. But when word of Jack’s bottomless knowledge of local New England history had gotten around—a seed that Jack had intentionally sowed himself—Nox had offered him a new job. “A promotion,” he had called it. He needed Jack’s historical expertise in solving a 150-year-old trail of riddles, scribbled on the pages of an antique Civil War journal. Riddles that, according to myth, would lead to an object of immeasurable value.

  So Jack had helped him unearth the second riddle. Then the third, and the fourth, and the fifth.

  The last time Jack had seen Nox was a week ago, when they’d followed the clues in the sixth riddle to Block Island. There, they’d excavated a chest from a bluff overlooking the ocean, only to find it completely empty.

  Because twenty-four hours prior, unbeknownst to Nox, Jack had dug up the seventh riddle for himself.

  Nox walked unhurriedly across the cellar floor, a half-empty glass of scotch in one hand. When he reached Jack, he noisily dragged a stool up beside the table and peered quietly down at his captive. Nox was the kind of man who, from a distance, seemed to be well-preserved for his age. His long, luxuriant hair had prematurely turned pewter, but his face was smooth, his blue eyes shrewd and arrogant in the way he took in the room. He wore an expensive three-piece suit, crisply pressed and tailored to his muscular contours. Yes, from a distance he looked closer to eighteen than thirty.

  But up this close, Jack could see where the illusion ended. Somewhere beneath the youthful, energetic veneer, there was a deep and penetrating sickness. Not just of the mind, but of the body as well. His vulpine face was pulled too tight, too thin, the angles of it harsh and exact, like the woodcut features of a ventriloquist dummy.

  Horace Nox was dying.

  Nox drained the last remnants of his drink in one long gulp, then tapped the glass with his manicured fingernail—ting, ting, ting. “Get me another Blood and Sand, Drumm,” he said in his baritone rasp. Even his vocal cords seemed to be stretched to their limits, a victim of wartime shrapnel. A scar still bisected his Adam’s apple.

  His giant manservant obediently snatched the tumbler from Nox’s hand and disappeared.

  “You know,” Nox said, finally addressing Jack, “in my line of business, you have to be paranoid. It’s the only way to survive, really. Day in and day out, I find myself dealing with gamblers and gangsters and drug dealers”—He jerked his thumb back toward where Aries was polishing one of her ram’s horns in front of a dirty mirror—“and disreputable sorts of all varieties. Yet of all the creeps on my payroll, I would have never guessed that you would be the one to steal from me.” He let out an exasperated laugh. “You! My fucking busboy! The ungrateful history nerd who ripped me off after I gave him the opportunity of a lifetime. You’re the one who took what was rightfully mine?”

  “Opportunity of a lifetime?” Jack echoed. “Golly, Pop, thanks for the minimum wage job scrubbing your dishes and doing your homework.”

  Nox tsk-tsked. “We both know you didn’t do this for the money.”

  “You know nothing about me, Horace.”

  “Is that so?” Nox snapped his fingers and Pearce handed him a folder. He licked his thumb and leafed through the papers inside. “Jack Tides,” he read aloud. “Age: eighteen. Graduated valedictorian of Dorchester High School and is now a freshman at Boston University majoring in American studies.” Nox placed a hand over his heart. “How patriotic of you.”

  As Nox continued reading, he paced around the table. “Son of Calista and Jack Tides Senior, who goes by ‘Buck’ amongst his associates. Calista is an immigrant by way of Cyprus, who worked her way through nursing school and has been employed at Children’s Hospital for the last twenty years. Shortly after she came to America in the early nineties, she met and married your degenerate father. Buck is old-city Irish and was a subway car driver for many years, but is currently locked away at Cedar Junction Correctional, serving a fifteen-year sentence for armed robbery. Chance of early parole for good behavior: unlikely.” Nox raised his eyebrows. “I guess the apple doesn’t fall far from the thieving tree.”

  “Enough,” Jack growled.

  Nox pursed his lips. “Oh, I haven’t even gotten to the juicy parts yet. You have two sisters. Sabra, seventeen, just started her senior year at Dorchester High.” He laughed lecherously and punched Jack on the arm. “Irish Twins, huh, only a year apart? I guess Mom and Old Buck couldn’t wait another minute to get back in the sack after you popped out.”

  In his mind, Jack pictured himself snapping free of his restraints and ripping Nox’s malformed larynx right out of his throat.

  “Sabra spends her evenings making a little extra cash as a pedicab driver in Boston, which means her report cards don’t tend to live up to those of her overachieving brother. And finally, there’s little Echo, age eight, who if I’m doing the math correctly, must have been conceived right before the Boston Police caught your father trying to roll over a warehouse—one of my warehouses, no less—with a semiautomatic. And according to my meticulous research …” Nox dropped the file and leaned over Jack. “… your eight-year-old sister is currently at Children’s Hospital in the oncology ward, being treated for stage-three Hodgkin’s lymphoma.”

  Jack’s eye brimmed with tears at the mention of Echo. “I said enough, you asshole.”

  Drumm returned with Nox’s cocktail. Nox swilled the sanguine liquid around, ruminating. “I’m not a heartless bastard like you probably think. Hell, I get it. Your little sister’s dying of cancer. So you worm your way into my organization. You give me the slip, you steal a page from the journal, and you take up the quest for yourself. You thought you could find the Serengeti Sapphire on your own and then use it to save Echo.” Nox broke off into a vile, wet cough. He plucked a white handkerchief from the pocket of his suit jacket and hacked explosively into it. When the convulsions finally ceased, he held the cloth up for Jack to see. It was speckled with blood. “But illness affects all of us, Jack. The Sapphire is destined to save me, not Echo.”

  “She’s just a kid, Horace,” Jack pleaded, choking on the words. �
��She is everything to me. And she is suffering. You of all people know what it’s like to waste away your childhood in constant agony.” He desperately searched Nox’s face for any sign that he was getting through to him. “So please, let’s put all this behind us and work together. There’s still time for us to give her the miracle that she deserves, before it’s too late.”

  There was a strange glint in Nox’s eye as he stared down into his drink, and Jack briefly hoped that he might have struck a chord. But then Nox asked, “Do you know what the difference is between me and Echo?” He tapped the area over his heart. “I’m a fighter. A survivor. After thirty years battling my way back from death’s threshold, I’ve earned my stripes. So I’ll be damned if I’m going to just pass off my ticket to a healthy life to some toddling slum rat who doesn’t have the guts not to give up.”

  That last part pushed Jack so far over the edge that his lips took on a life of their own. “Thirty years? All I see is the same cowering, sick little boy who never grew up—”

  Jack was blindsided when Nox drilled a fist into his injured knee. His vision seared white. “Where is the seventh page of the journal?” Nox screamed into his face. “Where is it, you little maggot?” The gangster hammered Jack’s mangled knee a second time, this time eliciting a pained scream from the boy. “I know you found it, so where is it? In the museum?”

  Jack offered nothing. He would protect Echo until his last breath.

  In a rage, Nox threw his drink across the room. It shattered against the stone wall. The kingpin stripped off his expensive coat and rolled up his sleeves, cuffing them at the elbows, exposing a tattoo across his wrist that read aiséirí—Gaelic for “resurrection.”

  Nox wound up like he was going to strike Jack again, this time across the face, but his hand stopped just shy. Instead, the gangster gave his men a single softly spoken order: “Funnel him.”

  Before Jack could make sense of this, Drumm forced the end of a plastic tube into his mouth. While Jack gagged, Aries uncapped a bottle of vodka and began to pour it into a funnel attached to the tube.

  The alcohol hit Jack’s mouth like a tidal wave of napalm. While his throat burned, he tried to push the tube out with his tongue, but it was jammed so tight that he was forced to swallow the booze to keep it out of his airway. His stomach turned from the onslaught. Right as Drumm removed the funnel at last, Jack vomited. He had to turn his head to keep from drowning in his own bile.

  “Where is the journal page?” Nox screamed. When Jack gritted his teeth and shook his head in response, Nox motioned to his henchmen and the process repeated. Drumm had to pry open Jack’s jaw to get the tube back in, but eventually he prevailed, and again the vodka flowed down his throat.

  By the time the second round of torture was over, the alcohol had already bled into Jack’s system. The room spun in lazy, uneven circles, and when he turned his head, there seemed to be a three-second delay before his body would obey the commands of his brain.

  This time, Nox grabbed a handful of Jack’s hair and forced the teenage boy to stare into his eyes. “Last chance, Tides,” Nox seethed. “Where is the journal page?”

  Jack brought his lips as close to Nox’s ear as he could.

  And then he whispered, “I used it … to wipe my ass.”

  Nox took a step away and sized up his prisoner. “He’s not going to tell me,” he said, his fury giving way to resignation. “If he wants to be a martyr, then let him die.” From a tray in the back of the room, Nox produced a large syringe. A transparent liquid squirted out of the needle when he tapped the plunger. “Pure ethanol,” he explained. “See, when your blood alcohol level rises above point-three percent, your body slowly begins to shut down. Severe motor impairment. Loss of bladder control. Irregularities in breathing and heartbeat. Unconsciousness. And death. Combined with the alcohol already in your system, this should put you right up around point-six percent.”

  Jack squirmed beneath the ropes, but Drumm and Pearce held him down by his shoulders. Nox handed the syringe to Aries. “I’m going to find that riddle, with or without your help, Jack. Once I obtain the Serengeti Sapphire and am resurrected, I promise to send two bereavement cards to your mother. One for you and one for Echo.”

  With that, Nox turned and headed back for the elevator doors.

  “What do you want us to do with him, boss?” Aries asked, twirling the syringe between her fingers.

  “Once his heart stops, toss him out in front of a rival nightclub,” Nox said. “Preferably the Mad Raven. Tonight he’ll be just another college student who didn’t know his limits and drank himself to death.” The elevator doors closed, and Jack’s last image of Nox was of him grinning softly and humming the tune We’ll Meet Again.

  Jack felt at once terrified and sluggish, as the vodka in his stomach continued to leach into his bloodstream. Maybe this wasn’t such a bad way to die. Maybe he’d feel nothing.

  He shut his eyes, crying softly, as Aries came toward him with the needle.

  But behind his closed eyelids, he saw something else.

  Poor Echo, laid up in her hospital bed, looking pale and gossamer as ever, her dimples growing smaller with each passing day. Sabra and his mother sitting by her bedside. All of them, staring at the hospital door, waiting for him to come.

  They’d never know the lengths he had gone to try and save Echo.

  He felt Drumm and Pearce relax their grip on his shoulders. He felt the needle bite into his skin.

  And that’s when he struck.

  With every vestige of strength he had left, he flung open his arms and jerked his body upright. Though the vodka may have diminished his coordination, it hadn’t sapped his brute strength. The rope burned intensely as it cut into his shoulders, but he felt its resistance suddenly give way.

  The rope snapped.

  Everyone was caught by surprise, and even Jack was shocked that it had worked. He ripped the syringe out of his leg before Aries had fully expelled its contents, flipped it around, and plunged it into Drumm’s thigh. Jack could feel the metal tip slice through the man’s mammoth quadriceps until it struck his femur bone. Drumm screamed and collapsed to the ground.

  Aries, doped up on Blyss, was slow to react, and Jack seized her by her prosthetic horns. With a savage jerk down, he smashed her face into the table and she too crumpled to the cellar floor.

  Pearce wrapped an arm around Jack’s neck and squeezed. Jack threw his elbow back into the dog handler’s gut to stun him. Pearce’s grip didn’t falter, so Jack kicked off on the table. The momentum carried the two of them to the floor, with Pearce on the bottom. Jack’s weight came down hard on the man, and there was a crack that must have been Pearce’s skull striking the cement. His hold on Jack slackened.

  Jack could already hear Aries stirring on the opposite side of the table, and Drumm was rolling on the floor, clutching his bloody thigh and growling something about murder.

  Jack knew that as the alcohol continued to seep into his bloodstream, he would soon lose consciousness. So with no other choice, he limped across the basement, hobbled up the steps, shouldered his way through the cellar doors, and stumbled out into the chilly October night.

  He had to call Sabra before the darkness took him.