This Eternity of Masks and Shadows Read online

  “We’re not looking for a normal person,” Cairn reminded him as the door slid open, revealing an elevator car barely large enough for the two of them. “We’re looking for a killer.”

  It had taken some convincing to get Nook on board with questioning Leopold Sibelius. Only after she’d reluctantly shared with him the barcode-engraved vial and the morbid details of her mother’s journal did the detective agree that the coincidences were too numerous to swallow.

  Cairn couldn’t be sure how deep the elevator sent them underground. When the doors parted, they found the doctor’s assistant waiting for them in a stainless-steel corridor, a digital tablet clutched tightly to her chest. She couldn’t have been older than thirty, though it was hard to say, because she’d tied her hair back into a bun so taut it would have ironed out any wrinkles. “Welcome to Vesuvius HQ-2. My name is Janet.” She held out two security badges. “For your safety, please wear these at all times.” Without further explanation, she turned and marched in the opposite direction.

  They followed her down the corridor, which had the sterile aesthetic of a spaceship. Each footfall on the metal-grated floors produced a heavy clang that would test even a ninja’s stealth.

  For someone who hadn’t even blinked at the sight of a body days earlier, Nook sure seemed uneasy in the claustrophobic setting. His hand continued to hover by his holster.

  They passed several windows as they traveled, each opening into a different wing of the laboratory. A cavern full of bubbling liquids and fermentation chambers. A large centrifuge spinning full tilt. A series of terrariums containing organisms ranging from jellyfish to a Burmese python, sleeping in a coil.

  Strangest of all was the hydroponic greenhouse, so full of lush vegetation that Cairn almost forgot that they were in a facility lodged deep in the earth’s crust. Vegetables of all kinds grew in tidy rows, along with a small grove of lemon trees. Ultraviolet lamps buzzed overhead.

  “You grow your own food?” Cairn asked. “Was the supermarket not organic enough for you?”

  “This is an entirely self-sustaining facility,” Janet replied, without bothering to explain more. She had stopped next to a glowing pad, and with a swipe of her hand, a hidden door hissed open. The assistant motioned for them to enter. “You may wait for the doctor in his study.”

  With its bookshelf-lined walls and mahogany desk, the office might have seemed normal if it weren’t for the stalactites protruding down from the stone ceiling. “I think they call this style cave couture,” Cairn said. She noticed the sheen of sweat on Nook’s brow. He looked like he was going to be ill. “You okay there?”

  Nook swallowed as he reluctantly took a seat in one of the chairs facing the desk. “I don’t care for enclosed spaces. Or the quarter-mile of rock between us and the surface.”

  “Me neither,” Cairn agreed. “So let’s convince this asshole to confess in record time and get the hell out of here.”

  They didn’t have long to wait. One of the bookshelves behind the desk abruptly rotated open and Dr. Leopold Sibelius emerged from the room beyond—living quarters from the brief glimpse Cairn caught of a bed and a floor-to-ceiling armoire.

  Strangest of all, the interior of the bedroom seemed to be in motion, its walls and furniture revolving and rearranging as the doctor stepped clear of it. Cairn craned her neck to see more, but the secret door sealed back into place, preventing further observation.

  The scientist had aged poorly in the twenty years since the expedition photo. Only a few patches of wiry hair remained, stubbornly clinging to his scalp like scraps of unraveling fabric. His pale translucent skin begged for a few minutes of sunlight and his hands shook with a perceptible tremor as he stripped off a pair of medical gloves and tossed them into the wastebasket.

  The doctor wasn’t alone. A black orb hovered behind him, shadowing his movements. Cairn spotted a camera lens and red blinking light to indicate that it was filming.

  Dr. Sibelius leisurely lowered himself into the leather throne on the opposite side of the desk. He took one unimpressed look at Cairn, then focused his attention fully on Nook. “You have five minutes, detective.” His hoarse voice dripped with exasperation. “What do you want?”

  To his credit, Nook had rallied from his bout of claustrophobia, his face now a mask of stoicism. “Since you’re recording this meeting, I’m sure you won’t mind if I do the same?” He placed his phone on the desk. “We’re investigating the homicide of District Attorney Tane Makoa. You knew the deceased. We have a few questions.”

  Sibelius scoffed. “Let me get this straight: A man I met once on a field trip two decades ago is dead, and you’re here talking to me? If that’s your threshold for suspicion, your persons-of-interest list must be a doozy.”

  “Yet you immediately recognized the name just now,” Nook said. “I can barely remember what I ate for breakfast this morning, let alone people I interacted with briefly twenty years ago. Your relationship couldn’t have been that insignificant.”

  “I am a genius,” the doctor replied, annunciating each syllable. “I remember everything in vivid detail. Furthermore, his death has been all over the news. I live in a cave system, detective—not a vacuum.”

  Nook flipped open his notepad. “Perfect, then there should be plenty of bats here who can vouch for your whereabouts the night of November 13. Here comes one now.”

  Janet had returned carrying a porcelain teapot. She filled the cup in front of Dr. Sibelius, then those in front of Nook and Cairn, before exiting immediately.

  The doctor leaned over the teacup and inhaled the steam rising from it, eyes closed in ecstasy. Nook cleared his throat impatiently, and the doctor sighed. “I was here all day and all night on November 13. The same could be said of November 12, and 11, and most of the last four thousand days preceding it.” He gestured to the drone hovering over him. “There’s plenty of footage to prove it, and my assistant will confirm my presence here as well.”

  “I don’t trust technology any more than I trust witnesses,” Nook said. “Both can be tampered with.”

  The doctor opened his mouth to make another retort, but Cairn refused to stay silent any longer. It was time to mix things up.

  She tossed the faded photograph of the expedition to Sable Noir onto the desk. It spun around and came to a stop facing him.

  The doctor visibly recoiled.

  “Tane isn’t the only person in that picture who’s dead,” she said. “I lost my mother two months ago, and I think this all has something to do with that island.”

  Dr. Sibelius gingerly picked up the photograph, then gazed at Cairn over the top of it, comparing. “Ah,” he exhaled a long breath as it clicked. “I suspected Sedna was newly with child on that expedition, which means that if I’m guessing your age correctly, then technically, you were there as well.” He turned back to Nook. “Maybe you should be investigating your partner.”

  Nook chucked his notebook across the room, preparing to switch fully to ‘bad cop’ mode, but Cairn beat him to it. “I know about everything that happened on Sable Noir,” she said. “About your daughter, Aether.”

  Dr. Sibelius had started to quake in his seat. “Don’t you say that name,” he seethed.

  Cairn met his fury with fury. She rose to her feet and leaned over the desk. “Every single person on that expedition has a motive for shutting the others up, even after two decades.” She pulled the empty vial from her pocket and rolled it toward the doctor. “But of the four of you who are still alive, my mother only left me an item belonging to you.”

  For once, Dr. Sibelius seemed at a loss for a pithy retort. A vein throbbed at his temple.

  “If you haven’t had contact with the others after all this time, why did my mother have a vial from a company you didn’t establish until years later?” Cairn demanded. “What was in the tube? Was it the same substance you were injecting your daughter with?”

  With each question, the doctor deflated deeper into his seat. Finally, he turned to the sur
veillance drone hovering behind him and said, “Sleep mode.” The camera’s red light blinked off.

  Dr. Sibelius bowed his head, his eyes glued to the glass vial. “This is just one of many. At your mother’s request, I’ve been sending her batches of serum for the last eighteen years.”

  Cairn couldn’t imagine an answer to her next question that she was going to like. “What kind of serum?”

  Dr. Sibelius took a long swig of his tea. “Years ago, I discovered a gene unique to all deities. Doesn’t matter what pantheon they come from or what abilities they possess: they all have it. It’s what separates gods from mortals. It is the key to their divinity, the gateway to their powers. Inhibit that one gene”—he snapped his fingers—“and Zeus is no different than you and me.”

  “You found a way to turn off a god’s powers?” Nook asked. He pushed the teacup in front of him away.

  “Only for a limited time. I called the serum Tacitus. When we visited Sable Noir, I was searching for a more permanent solution, one I never found.”

  Cairn’s stomach churned. “Why would my mom, who was a goddess herself, want a chemical that would subdue her abilities?”

  “She wouldn’t tell me, and after what happened on that island, I wasn’t exactly in a position to ask.”

  “You’re a genius,” Nook reminded him. “I’m sure after all this time you’ve developed a hypothesis that you can share with the class.”

  Dr. Sibelius formed a steeple with his fingers. “If you ask me, she wasn’t self-administering. It’s possible that she intended to subdue another god. That is, after all, the very reason I created the serum in the first place: to contain those who pose a danger to the public. But given the size of the batches I was sending her …” He trailed off, his eyes glazed over and distant.

  Cairn’s stomach churned. Her mother had supposedly been working to create a world that was safe for mortals and deities alike. Why would she stockpile a drug that could render her own kind powerless? What did you get into before you died, Mom? Cairn wondered.

  Dr. Sibelius staggered to his feet, nearly knocking over the chair behind him. “I … don’t feel well,” he mumbled, his eyes fluttering drowsily. “Will you excuse me for just one moment while I splash some water on my face?” Without waiting for Nook’s approval, he lowered his head and quickly darted for the exit.

  After the door whisked shut behind him, Cairn and Nook locked eyes. “Do you think he’s our guy?” she asked.

  Nook glanced back at the door. “That man is guilty of something bad,” he said. “But I’m not sure it’s murder. At least not this one.”

  Cairn approached the surveillance drone and tapped on the black lens. The floating camera drifted backward, then returned to its previous spot.

  “I’ll give him sixty seconds,” Nook said. “After that, I’m going to barge into the bathroom and drag him back by his wiry—”

  An alarm sounded and red lights flashed across the office. “Code black, code black,” a woman’s robotic voice announced. “Code black, code black.”

  They both raced for the door at the same moment. It didn’t automatically open as they approached, and Nook pounded angrily on the metal.

  Cairn spotted an emergency release recessed into the wall beside the exit. After a moment of intense pulling, the lever snapped back and the hydraulic door groaned open just wide enough for them to slip through the gap.

  Nook freed his gun from his holster and motioned for Cairn to stay behind him. She clamped her hands over her ears to shield them from the high-pitched sirens as they moved down the hallway toward the elevator.

  They stopped dead when they came to the window into the hydroponic gardens and watched the scene unfolding within.

  Dr. Sibelius and his assistant stood beneath one of the lemon trees. Both wore placid expressions, their eyes milky and vacant, oblivious to the deafening blare of the alarm.

  Janet held a gigantic python. It writhed in her hands, but she gripped it tight. Her muscles strained as she extended it forward with tremendous effort.

  The doctor knelt beneath the snake. His eyes looked directly out the window, gazing straight through Cairn and Nook, as he reached behind one of the lemon tree’s gnarled roots—and withdrew a large beaker brimming with yellow liquid. He raised it over his head.

  Nook frantically groped around the wall searching for the entrance into the gardens, but Cairn watched, transfixed, even as she sensed something horrible was about to follow.

  The alarms abruptly shut off, and the sudden quiet allowed Cairn to hear the doctor say one cryptic sentence, muffled through the glass between them.

  “I will be free of these chains at Ragnarok,” he proclaimed.

  Then Dr. Sibelius tilted his head back, opened his mouth, and poured the beaker’s contents directly onto his own face.

  Steam billowed up as the liquid made contact with his flesh.

  When it cleared, his face had already begun to melt.

  The doctor released a bloodcurdling scream as his pale cheeks blistered into an angry red. Blood vessels popped and tributaries of blood raced down his jowls. He clawed impotently at his eyes, then grasped at his throat, as though he could stop the acid from racing down his esophagus.

  In his final moments, the doctor lunged toward the garden window. Cairn covered her mouth in horror and fell back.

  One of the doctor’s devastated eye sockets gaped at her as his face slowly slid down the glass, leaving a bloody smear in its wake.

  Phantom Limb

  Cairn quivered in terror on the metal floor, one panel of glass separating her from the dead doctor. His disfigured face was frozen in an eternal scream, still faintly smoking.

  Nook had finally unsealed the door and barged inside. Janet continued to hold the python aloft, as though her boss hadn’t just melted off his face. “Drop the snake!” Nook barked, then seemed to realize that complying would set the serpent loose in the gardens. “Never mind, keep holding the snake, but … don’t move.”

  The assistant showed no signs that she’d heard any of his instructions. Her glassy eyes gazed off into an imaginary universe.

  Nook pressed two fingers to the wrist of Dr. Sibelius, careful to avoid the splashes of acid that were still disintegrating his flesh. Cairn watched him straighten and mouth a curse when he found no pulse.

  The detective reemerged from the garden and crouched in front of Cairn, who still hadn’t risen from the floor. “Are you okay?” he asked. When she didn’t answer, he snapped his fingers in front of her face. “Eyes on me. Are you okay?”

  “It was like he was possessed.” The words spilled out of Cairn in a manic rant. She couldn’t put her finger on the exact point she was trying to make. “Like they were both possessed.”

  “I saw.” Nook glanced back at the assistant. “Maybe she’ll have some answers for us whenever she emerges from Neverland. Like why she decided to play snake charmer.”

  But Cairn already knew the answer to this one. Shock still muddled some parts of her brain, but the doctor’s final words echoed in her ears. “They were reenacting the myth of Loki’s torture.”

  “Loki?” Nook repeated. “Like the Norse trickster god?”

  Cairn held out her hands and let the detective pull her to her feet. Still shaken, she tried to string together an abridged version of the story her mother once told her. “When the other Norse gods of Asgard grew sick of Loki’s shenanigans, they hunted him down. He had taken refuge in the mountains and transformed into a salmon to avoid detection. But one day, the gods cornered him beneath a waterfall, and as Loki attempted to leap from his pursuers, the mighty Thor caught him midair.”

  Cairn tried to avoid looking at the doctor’s body as she followed Nook back into the garden. “To punish Loki for orchestrating the murder of Baldur, master of light, Thor and the other gods chained the trickster in a cave, beneath a serpent. Its fangs would drip venom onto his face until Ragnarok—the great final cataclysm of the gods—when Loki finally broke
free to wreak havoc on the nine worlds.”

  Nook held his cell phone up to the light. “No service down here. I’ll have to go above ground to call it in, but I doubt the paramedics are going to be able to give this guy a new face and a heartbeat.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “So let me get this straight. Out of six people in a photograph from twenty years ago, three of them are dead. Two of them killed themselves in a manner that mimicked ancient myths involving divine punishment.”

  “No,” Cairn replied. “All three of them.”

  Nook squinted at her.

  She swallowed. “I couldn’t figure out why my mother chose to leave this world the way she did. The anchor. The bloody fingers.” Cairn had been too close to see it before, but now, as a pattern emerged, it was clear as day. “She was reenacting her own creation myth. According to Inuit lore, Sedna’s father cut off her fingers and cast her off his canoe into the sea, where she slipped down into the fathoms and became the mother of all sea life and master of the underworld.”

  Cairn collapsed against the trunk of the lemon tree behind her. Over the last week, she’d come to suspect that sinister processes had driven her mother to suicide. But now, after witnessing the same dreamy void in Dr. Sibelius’s eyes right before he died, she realized the truth was far darker.

  “My mom didn’t kill herself,” she said. “She was murdered.”

  Nook ran a hand through his hair. “So we’re dealing with a serial killer. A supernatural one who can possess his victims.”

  Cairn started to reply, but her gaze drifted past him to the assistant. “Nook!” she screamed.

  He spun around. The python had escaped from Janet’s grasp and had apparently decided to seek revenge by wrapping itself around her neck. As it constricted, Janet’s face turned a violent shade of purple. She clawed at the snake, but it only tightened its coils.

  “Cover your ears!” Nook yelled. Then he drew his gun and fired a single round up at the ceiling.