This Eternity of Masks and Shadows

by Karsten Knight

  “We shouldn’t have come here.”

  The last line came from behind Sedna, and she turned to find Comstock, the ship’s captain, staring resignedly toward the island. His leathery face and stringy hair looked like they had been left outside to weather half a century of cyclones and biting winds. Sedna hadn’t seen him smile once. She wondered if he knew how.

  “We shouldn’t have come here,” he repeated, this time directed at Sedna, as though she alone had chartered the ship.

  “Oh, cheer up, Capitán.” Ra clapped his hand on Comstock’s back. “While we’re off doing our research on shore, you can relax back here, sunbathing, dipping your toes in the water, posing for fish stick advertisements—whatever it is you do in your spare time.”

  Comstock leveled the sun god with a penetrating glare. “If y’all are scientists, then I’m a Vegas showgirl.” With that, he did a robotic about-face and returned to the bridge.

  “Really, which casino?” Ra called after him, but the metal door clanged shut behind the captain.

  Aether, the child, had been watching all of this with her big brown eyes, which were so large and expressive they seemed to take up half her face. Sedna knelt in front of her. “Are you excited to explore the island?” she asked the girl, hoping to elicit some hint of emotion. “You’ll be one of the youngest adventurers this century to set food on uncharted lands.”

  But Aether didn’t give so much as a nod. As far as Sedna knew, the girl was a mute. It wouldn’t have surprised her if Dr. Sibelius had concocted her in his lab. She looked nothing like her bespectacled father, who had the wiry hair and frantic demeanor of someone who’d recently inserted his finger into an electrical outlet.

  Dr. Sibelius squeezed the little girl’s shoulder. “Aether is just a little shy,” he repeated for what must have been the fortieth time during the journey.

  Sedna studied the scientist. His left eye ticked uncontrollably every time he smiled. It was still unclear why Themis had allowed this twitchy mortal to accompany them and drag his child along as well.

  All she knew was that his deep pockets had funded the expedition. When she’d asked him yesterday what he hoped to find on Sable Noir, he responded with a rehearsed speech about how “an isolated island like this could have given rise to plant or animal species with medicinal properties of critical scientific value to the bioengineering community.”

  Sedna opened her mouth to resume her interrogation of the doctor, but the ship gave a sudden lurch. They all collapsed against the railing, and Sedna instinctively caught Aether before the girl could slip through the bars and into the ocean.

  The gods looked around in confusion, then seemed to reach the same conclusion simultaneously:

  Instead of slowing down, the ship was accelerating toward the island.

  Tane was the first to rush to the bridge, but the door was locked shut. As he tugged in vain to turn the metal wheel, Sedna peered through the stormproof windows.

  Captain Comstock stood at the helm, calm as ever, his placid gaze fixed on the island. Even as she pounded on the glass, he didn’t even flinch.

  “Something’s wrong with him!” Sedna yelled to the others.

  “You mean other than the fact that he’s trying to play chicken with an inanimate volcano?” Ra snapped. He and Njörun were frantically searching the deck for something to smash through the windows, but everything was bolted down.

  “Screw it!” Ra stripped off his shirt. “So much for the no-powers-in-front-of-mortals rule.” His sinewy arms erupted in flames as he steeled himself to burn his way into the bridge.

  The captain had other plans. The ship turned hard, sending all of them falling against the bulwark once more. With Ra’s upper body engulfed in flame, he melted through the railing and disappeared off the edge with a yelp. A geyser of steam erupted where he landed in the water.

  Njörun rushed to the railing and watched her extinguished boyfriend drift away in the boat’s wake. “There goes our blowtorch,” she said in her lyrical faraway tone. “Tane, can use your abilities to breach the bridge?”

  The forest spirit was kicking at the windows to no avail. “Sure thing, I’ll just mold my way through the door. Should only take a few millennia. Why don’t you dream a way in?”

  “Not helpful,” Sedna replied. She saw now that when Captain Comstock made his last correction, he’d steered them on a collision course for a jagged outcropping of stone just offshore.

  At their current speed, it would tear the vessel to shrapnel.

  An idea came to her in the heat of the moment. She projected a series of ‘chirps’ across the water in all directions. After a pause, from the south, she heard the warbling inhuman response she’d been hoping for.

  Sedna reached out through the ocean, telepathically forging a connection with the creature. As the bond strengthened, the sounds of the boat grew distant, replaced by the muffled rush of water as though she, too, were rising from the depths. The waters to the boat’s leeward side frothed as a gigantic figure approached.

  Then the fin whale breached the surface. Though it weighed seventy tons and was nearly a hundred feet long, its hulking gray body sliced through the water at surprising speed.

  Meanwhile, the rocks loomed ahead of them, preparing to decimate their boat. Sedna diverted her attention back to her own body long enough to shout, “Brace for impact!”

  With a final shrill war cry, the whale slammed its nose into the side of the ship.

  Even prepared for this one, the impact knocked Sedna flat. The Dreadnaught listed hard to starboard, and the deck around them tilted forty-five degrees. As she slid toward the railing, Sedna wondered if she’d miscalculated and caused the whole vessel to capsize.

  But then the ship righted itself, and with relief, Sedna saw that the whale had knocked them off-course. The vessel cruised past the stones, close enough to reach out and touch them.

  They weren’t in the clear yet, though. Their new path was headed toward the island, and before Sedna could prep another assault from the whale, they ran aground.

  A muffled grinding followed as the prow parted the black sands of the island’s beach, before the Dreadnaught ultimately came to a shuddering halt. For a few more moments, the propeller attempted in vain to keep chugging forward. With a forlorn, high-pitched whine, the overheated engine finally died.

  Sedna choked on the putrid odor of burning that engulfed the deck. Through the haze, she saw the captain still standing rigid at the helm, unblinking. In Comstock’s mind, they were endlessly sailing forward on their suicide collision course toward Sable Noir.

  We shouldn’t have come here, he had said.

  In that moment, Sedna couldn’t help but agree.

  There was something very wrong with this place.

  Njörun was at the railing, pointing back at her boyfriend, who was just a tiny blip in the water. “Should take him only two or three hours of doggy-paddling to wash ashore,” she said without concern.

  As Sedna checked on Aether, Nagual sauntered out onto the deck, robe swinging open. He gave a big yawn and stretched. “Good morning. What did I miss?” Then his gaze drifted to the beach and the forest of palm trees. “Oh good,” he added. “We’ve arrived.”

  Icarus

  Cairn had never been so grateful for a hot shower.

  Her body ached from the newly inflicted bruises that Dr. Themis had painted on her body. The spray of scalding water against her bare skin was alternately soothing and agonizing.

  As she leaned against the ornate tile wall of the mansion’s luxurious bathroom, breathing in the steam, she couldn’t help but wonder how many times her mother had been here, recovering from close combat training with her blind mentor.

  That was, if everything Themis had said about Ahna being her protege turned out to be true.

  After she dried and dressed, she wandered back down the dimly lit hallway toward the doctor’s office. As she passed through the main foyer, the front doors burst open.

  Th
e man was so burly that he eclipsed the light spilling in from the outside. He had the broad, muscular build of an NFL linebacker, or at least a retired one—his tattered wool peacoat struggled to contain his broad chest and shoulders. As he approached her, she saw that his slicked back undercut had gone stark white at the temples, even though he couldn’t be much older than his early forties. He had a handsome, tan face and dimpled chin that could pass for youthful if he didn’t look so damn tired. If she wasn’t mistaken, the man was possibly of indigenous descent like her.

  He strode past Cairn wordlessly, his eyes flicking to her with something that bordered on curiosity, but he never slowed. Only as she watched him walk away did her eyes track down to the end of his left sleeve.

  Where his hand should have been, a metal prosthesis hung in its place.

  He entered Themis’s office without knocking. “I’ve got a body in a cranberry bog getting colder by the minute,” he snapped in a gruff voice that rolled like thunder. “What was so urgent that I had to—” At that point, he closed the door behind him, reducing the conversation to murmurs.

  Cairn edged closer, hoping to hear more. The stranger had gone silent, listening as Dr. Themis explained something in her calm, measured therapist voice. A pause ensued.

  Then the man exploded.

  “Absolutely not!” he shouted, followed by the sharp knock of his fist striking the doctor’s desk. “Have you gone completely senile?” His volume oscillated erratically, so that Cairn only caught certain words. “Liability … only a child … corpse decomposing … what next, should we hand her a gun?”

  His rant might have continued on forever if Dr. Themis hadn’t silenced him with one cutting question:

  “Have you forgotten your debt?”

  Neither spoke for a full minute after that. Cairn could only imagine the stare-down happening, so intense that it threatened to ignite the desk between them. She pressed her ear to the door.

  “If I let her tag along,” the man said finally, “my debt is repaid. More than repaid. You ask far too much.”

  “Deal,” Themis said. “For what it’s worth, I think this could be as therapeutic for you as it is for—”

  “Stuff your psycho-babble straight up your ass,” the man barked, cutting her off.

  His footsteps approached the door, and Cairn scrambled backward. The knob jiggled, but the man paused inside to get the last word. His next sentence made Cairn’s blood run ice cold:

  “Sedna wouldn’t have wanted this.”

  The door burst open. Cairn tried her best to look nonchalant and uninterested, but as she leaned against the wall, she slipped and had to grab a candle sconce to keep from totally flopping to the floor.

  At first, it seemed as though the man intended to ignore her entirely. But a few paces past her, his shoulders sagged, and with a deep sigh of resignation, he backtracked until he stood in front of Cairn.

  “Here are the ground rules,” he said, arms folding over his barrel chest. “There will be absolutely no idle small talk in my car. You may refer to me as ‘Detective Bedard,’ ‘sir,’ or nothing at all. And if you touch the siren, you exit the car immediately, even if we are going eighty on the Mass Pike. Understood?”

  “Yessir,” Cairn replied.

  She followed the detective out to his car, a rusting, unmarked Dodge Challenger in desperate need of a carwash. As she tried to enter through the passenger-side door, she found her seat already occupied by a bottle of whiskey.

  “Don’t worry.” Nook reached across and chucked the bottle out onto Themis’s lawn. “It’s empty.”

  I’m worried because it’s empty, Cairn thought as she buckled herself in.

  As the Challenger zoomed southbound down I-93, they sat in awkward silence. She repeatedly found herself reaching for the car radio, only to get a slight but deliberate shake of the head from the man in the driver’s seat, his face impassive.

  Fifteen minutes into the ride, she couldn’t handle the quiet any longer. “So what the hell kind of name is Nook anyway?”

  This time, when the detective turned to her, she could feel him glaring from behind his aviator sunglasses.

  But Cairn couldn’t help herself. “Let me guess, and don’t say anything until I get it right. It’s a nickname your precinct gave you because you’re a fan of portable reading tablets. Or you have a little corner of the office where you like to curl up in and nap during your lunch break. Or—”

  “It’s short for something,” he growled.

  “Snookums?”

  Nook held up a warning finger. “Don’t you think it’s a tad ironic, you ridiculing others for having weird names?”

  “Cairn means ‘pile of rocks,’” she explained.

  “I’ve been hiking once or twice, kid. I know what a cairn is.”

  “Well, I guess I’m just the poster child for when a geologist convinces his wife to let him name their firstborn.” Cairn hated the defensive whine to her voice, but suddenly she was right back in kindergarten, trying to justify herself to the Kates and Michelles of the world. “You know what I’ve never understood? Think of how many pretty, gemstone-inspired names my dad could have picked. Amber, Jade, Pearl, Ruby, Sapphire. Instead, he named me after a pile of drab granite.” She sighed and looked out the window. “I guess I should be grateful my mother didn’t name me. I could have ended up ‘Manatee’ or ‘Porpoise.’”

  After a beat, Nook said, “Cairns help people find their way.”

  “What?” She turned back to him.

  He cleared his throat. “I’m just saying, when hikers get lost on a mountain, the cairns are always there to help them find their way back. Maybe … maybe that’s what your dad was going for.” Cairn’s staring must have made him uncomfortable because he grumbled, “Gods help us when I’m the one trying to be optimistic.”

  Cairn decided that this was the appropriate moment to blindside the detective with the question that had been haunting her since they left the mansion. “So how did you know my mother?”

  Nook reached for the thermos in the cup holder, eyes never leaving the road. “Who said I knew her?”

  “You did,” Cairn said. “Back at Dr. Themis’s mansion. When you were bitching about me shadowing you, you said, ‘Sedna wouldn’t have wanted this.’ You used her goddess name.”

  Nook took a long sip of coffee, and Cairn could see his mental wheels turning as he calculated what and how much to say next. “I guess you could say we were colleagues. By now I imagine Themis has caught you up to speed on some of your mother’s … nocturnal activities. While I provided support for the doctor’s investigations from a law enforcement perspective, Sedna pursued justice in what you could call an ‘unsanctioned’ capacity.” Nook shrugged. “Beyond that, Boston isn’t exactly thriving with Inuit expatriates, so we have to stick together.”

  So he was Inuit, too. All at once, the puzzle pieces clicked together. A thrill of excitement raced through Cairn as she recalled one of her favorite myths. “Nook—as in short for Nanook? The master of polar bears?”

  Nook’s prosthetic fingers tightened on the steering wheel. “That’s not me.”

  “You’re lucky that you’re on the right side of the law because you are terrible at lying.” Cairn suddenly found herself unable to stop babbling. “What on earth are you doing down here in Massachusetts? It’s not like there are an abundance of polar bears around to control, except for that one at the Franklin Park Zoo, and he always looks just a little bit sad—”

  “That is not me,” Nook growled with finality, so fiercely that Cairn recoiled.

  Then all the anger seemed to evaporate from him. He rolled down the window and let a wave of cold air rush into the car. In a softer voice, he added, “Not anymore.”

  Eventually, they crossed over the Sagamore Bridge, which marked the threshold of Cape Cod. Cairn inhaled the briny smell of the canal below. While the stretch of seaside towns bustled with beachgoers throughout the summer, thrumming with energy, the arrival of autu
mn had warded off all but the year-round locals who called the Cape home.

  Still, there was a quiet energy here that Cairn had always loved. She’d accompanied her mother to the Cape on research trips, even in the dead of winter, as Ahna gathered water samples or tagged and released fish.

  Knowing now what she did about her mother, it pained her to realize just how oblivious she’d been during those trips, that the Ahna she experienced then was only a fragment of a much more complex and mysterious woman.

  In the bayside village of Orleans, Nook eventually turned down a gravel drive and drifted to a hard stop in a small parking lot. As they stepped out of the car and into the chilly morning, Cairn squinted up at a sign that read “Tart Hill Farms,” spelled out in hand-painted cranberries. “A cranberry bog?” She tightened the belt of her peacoat around her. “Are we investigating a crime scene or making a cobbler?”

  Nook was stepping into a pair of knee-high galoshes he’d retrieved from the trunk. “Keep joking.” He pointed to her furry boots. “You’re about to find out how those look in brown.”

  After a short walk, the path through the trees opened into an expansive clearing. The bog consisted of an endless network of cranberry vines snaking through the soil, a sea of scarlet for a half-mile in every direction. As soon as they stepped into the basin, Cairn’s left foot plunged into the muck. She stared down at where her designer boots had been swallowed by the peaty mess and released an exasperated sigh.

  “Told ya.” Nook cruised past her, smirking. “I’m sure it will come out with a little soap and water. Follow me, Swamp Thing.”

  They carved a path between cranberry patches and Cairn had to admit that it was undeniably beautiful here. The morning sun simmered at a low angle over the clearing. As they journeyed deeper into the bog, she felt a flicker of peace she hadn’t experienced since before her mother died.

  That serenity evaporated the moment they arrived at the body.

  Cairn knew they’d reached the crime scene because two local police officers were interviewing a farmer in a waist-high rubber suit. A plastic curtain occluded her view of the cranberry patch beyond.