Chapter Fifty-Seven

Evenfall’s Cards

The woman walking beside me seemed to think I had something she needed. She certainly had something I needed. Knowledge. Information about Umbra and the Miskenupik. What other Pillars had they found? I also wondered how deeply she had waded into their world but could not fathom the answer. She lacked the marking of the bound, which was one thing. We marched onward.

A full winter moon hung high, and its light mysteriously fell down upon us through the dense canopy of hardwoods and junipers. Something about the play of moonlight and snow cast a haunted visibility to the forest this night. Has the fall of one Pillar transformed Dark Woods?

We had been walking for several hours when somewhere behind us a lone wolf howled. His cry was urgent without sounding sorrowful or desperate. Jean stopped briefly.

“It’s all right,” he told us without looking back. “They’re coming for us, but they haven’t found our trail.”

My heart began to quicken like it always does when I have hounds at my heels. “Who is chasing us?” I asked.

“Friends of hers,” Jean answered. “The ones with guns.”

“I’d like to show you something,” Evenfall interrupted as she came to an abrupt stop. “I think you may find it enlightening.”

I looked at Jean, and he understood that I wanted to know if we had the time. She had good reason to stall us if she wanted her friends to catch up. On the other hand, she needed me for something, and her friends might disturb her plan.

“The story can only unfold in certain places. This is one,” she continued.

“Let the warrior speak,” Jean commanded.

We stood near the bank of a nameless creek. Here the moonlight fell yellow and cold and lit a path from the northern sky, across the narrow waterway, to the rocky ground beneath our feet. The winter had not yet turned the running stream to ice, and the ivory sparkle upon the surface was eerily reminiscent of a sunset path, albeit one of pallor.

Evenfall took my hand and led me to the water’s edge. Jean stood behind us, casting an occasional glance over his shoulder. As I stood upon the southern bank I marveled at how similar each shoreline was. Oceans, the Great Lakes, forest creeks. They each shaped a border both separating and joining disparate worlds. Sometimes their surfaces reflected the dying fires of the setting sun, and other times the cold, detached caress of the winter moon. I had grown comfortable at this merging of worlds, this fine line that joined the two.

Evenfall unbuttoned her coat enough to reveal a black leather satchel, which hung over her left shoulder. She unfastened its single wooden hook and produced a small, stiff piece of birch paper. I spotted other paintings, but these she left secured in the confines of the satchel. She handed me the one card, and I lay my eyes upon it with great interest.

“You are either very brave or very stupid,” she told me as I studied the painting under the moon’s jaundiced light. Evenfall knew this piece of art was not one that could be viewed as through a protective computer screen. This diminutive painting had no safe border separating it from myself. I recognized the image as Miskenupik even though I’d never seen this particular work.

“Mostly stupid,” I replied, but I was already losing myself in the art. I experienced no physical sensation while handling the small painting and that made it different from other viewings. Still, it drew me in.

A blindfolded man stood motionless beneath a gray and turbulent sky. The ground beneath his clay-colored moccasins was marshy. Turquoise breakers prepared to crash violently behind him at a considerable distance. The man was surrounded by three staffs of rotting ash that had each been thrust into the ground at an awkward angle, a macabre parody of living saplings. The diseased wood formed a triangle. Several slack wrappings of fragile gray linen that might easily have been cast off by an unwilling participant loosely bound the prisoner’s arms.

His age was indeterminate, but he was fairly lean and had long brown hair swept by the same gray wind that caused the distant sea to swell. Several nodal points caught my eye. Disjointed line suggesting a fractured sunset. The head of a fish rising above the water. Once I recognized the pattern things shifted.

The man’s hair was now short. What I mistook for his dirty brown cloak was, upon closer inspection, more modern. An oilskin coat, perhaps, black and clean. The prisoner’s moccasins were really boots of black leather. The gray light suddenly seemed darker and more sinister, more violet. The wind howled from within this dangerous card.

The prisoner moved to his left, beyond the diseased wood. This was not Kesemanetow. He mounted a motorcycle, which had been parked out of view, on the hard-packed sand at the far end of the beach.

The silver Harley Softail sped noisily away as the man made his escape along a shoreline road. The neighborhood where I used to live. The forest to the rider’s left grew thin as he approached the northern edge of town. Clumps of aster shone purple in the dying light of dusk. The black-cloaked rider let the V-Twin idle as he paused at the stop sign in front of a nature sanctuary. I needed to sever this connection, but I could not turn my eyes away from the moving pictures. This was far more realistic than a three-dimensional movie.

The rider looked at the squat saltbox of a building and felt no shock at seeing the parking lot already half full. Rain pelted the dirty roofs of pickup trucks and sport utility vehicles. He sat his black helmet upon the black leather seat of the Harley as he wondered again about the worlds that exist beyond this one.

“This was not created by Isabel’s people,” Evenfall told me.

A chill ran up my spine. After all, the card told my story.. How has Evenfall come by this work of art? And why? Treachery was afoot. I looked away from the cursed painting yet did so reluctantly. The Miskenupik was now simply an inanimate card, which I held in my trembling hand.

“You can be swallowed by this sort of thing, if you’re not careful,” she told me.

I was not drawn into Evenfall’s painting the way Isabel’s Kesemanetow would have consumed me. The rider’s hand never reached for mine. I felt no electricity, and the boundaries of this piece did not enfold me into its heart. Nevertheless this was a work inspired by the Broken Path. Can it swallow me? Is the poison already beginning to seep into my soul, through the crack between worlds?

Instinctively I imagined the sun glowing red and fierce somewhere in the back of my mind. I handed Evenfall her dangerous work, which now had static imagery and the original gray sky. How much time has elapsed? I felt exhausted and slightly contaminated by what I had witnessed.

“What is your part in all this?” I asked. The moonlight now seemed particularly brilliant, and I needed to squint. Is this what they referred to as the killing moon? I watched the play of light upon the black water.

“You’ve not defeated your enemy,” she told me, “you’ve merely wounded them.”

I turned around to find Jean waiting patiently. He had not seen my final battle with the Binders of Souls and perhaps was not as shocked as I to hear this statement from the warrior.

“How much time did I waste?”

“Enough,” he answered. We waded through the creek and then pressed onward.

“You didn’t answer my question,” I reminded Evenfall. We forged a path through an otherwise dense stand of hemlock, its branches drooping under the weight of newly fallen snow.

“I am an artist.” More than a hint of defiance laced her voice. “That is all you need to know for now.”

I could fathom that this dangerous woman was responsible for the painting, but I could not see the how or the why. I assumed the Miskenupik works were limited in number. Some would have been destroyed with the fall of Umbra. Has she have found a way to create more? Do they require awakening as well? Sacrifice? The howl of the same lone wolf called from somewhere south of us. Closer than before.

“We need to move,” Jean ordered. We increased our pace.

“Who are they?” I asked Evenfall.

“The Miskenupik have many followers among the living. Certain occupations seem to attract them while others provide the culture to allow them to thrive. Law enforcement provides a little of both. The three you met earlier are part of an order founded by the late Cleveland Umbra.”

“He’s not a cop,” I corrected her, “or wasn’t,” I corrected myself in light of recent events.

“The Miskenupik count amongst their order men and women from all walks of life. They have no real bond between them save for their unquenchable thirst for power. The highest ranks of law enforcement are permeated by them.”

Evenfall was referring to her associates as “they” rather than “we.” Maybe none of the men and woman who studied the ancient religion thought of themselves as followers. Their power came from separation, after all, and never unity.

“You would have done well to avoid them,” she said.

“Number one, I didn’t seek them out.” I didn’t mask the anger in my voice. “Number two, I never asked for any of this.” I swept my arm out in a grand gesture that took in vast swaths of Dark Woods.

All of it seemed thrust upon me. Well, if I’m being honest, maybe not. I was not exactly a passive player in the drama. I could have turned away from this path long ago but chose instead to press onward. Same for Jean and Light.

“Why did you not avoid them?” I asked derisively.

“I needed them to collect you.” She emphasized the word playfully.

I was getting irritated that this chick thought I was going to help her in some way. She was consuming quite a few work hours worth of police resources with her plot, not to mention ruining my plans for a quiet evening.

“They also needed me. They want me to retrieve Isabel’s Kesemanetow.”

There it was again. The false belief that I had access to the last of the Kesemanetow secreted away by the last of the great warriors at the time of her death. Those fuckers made an earlier attempt on my life for the same erroneous belief.

“If that is what you need from me then you can forget it,” I told her.

Jean now led us further east. The next waterway we neared was more of a river than a creek, and we hiked parallel to it with the hope it would eventually narrow. Sad patches of flowerless milkweed poked through the more shallow drifts of snow along the bank.

Evenfall remained silent, and this irritated me even more.

“I don’t have the fucking cards. Why don’t you just paint what you need?”

She said nothing. That got me wondering. Why had she not tried to reproduce the lost treasure? Perhaps she couldn’t. The one work I saw, after all, was extraordinary and powerful, but it was not a true Miskenupik. The image was missing something.